Destructors

What is a Destructor?

A destructor is the opposite of a constructor. It is called when the object of a class is no longer in use. The object is destroyed and the memory it occupied is now free for future use.

C++ does not have transparent garbage collection like Java. Hence, in order to efficiently free memory, we must specify our own destructor for a class.

In this destructor, we can specify the additional operations which need to be performed when a class object is deleted.

A class destructor can be created in a similar way to the constructor, except that the destructor is preceded by the ~ keyword.

Explicit Garbage Collection

A small degree of garbage collection can be easily achieved through smart pointers. A smart pointer, the shared_ptr in particular, keeps a reference count for the object it points. When the counter comes down to 0, the object is deleted.

It’s time to make a destructor and see how it behaves.

Example