Hi everyone ✋ Over this whole series we’ve learned to love pointers ─ how they hold addresses, walk arrays, reach into objects, manage memory, and even name members in the abstract. Today we turn the lamp on the dark side 🌑. Every scary story you’ve heard about C++ ─ mysterious crashes, corrupted data, “it worked […]

Hi everyone ✋ In the previous post we met the this pointer ─ the hidden pointer that lets an object refer to itself. We pushed our house picture nicely along: an object is a house, and this is the card by the door holding its own address. Today we take that one curious step further

Hi everyone ✋ In the previous post we learned how to reach into an object through a pointer using the arrow operator ->. We pictured an object as a house 🏠, its members as rooms, and a pointer as the address slip that gets us there. Today we turn that idea inward and ask a

Hi everyone ✋ In the previous post we sorted out NULL vs nullptr ─ how to say “this pointer leads nowhere” in a clean, type-safe way. Along the way we leaned on a little picture of address slips and a mailroom 📬. Today we pick that picture right back up ─ because now we finally

Hi everyone ✋ In the previous post we learned how to lock our pointers down with const ─ freezing either the value a pointer looks at, the address it holds, or both. We spent that whole post deciding what a pointer is allowed to change. Today we ask a different question ─ what if a

Hi everyone ✋ In the previous post we peeled the label off our pointers and met the mysterious, typeless void pointer 📦 ─ a pointer that can hold the address of anything, but knows the type of nothing. If we haven’t read the earlier posts in this series, it’s worth going through them first ─

Hi everyone ✋ In the previous post we stacked pointers on top of pointers and conquered that dizzying double asterisk ** 😵‍💫. In this post we are gonna learn about ─ the mysterious, “typeless” void pointer 😉 If you haven’t read the earlier posts in this series, please go through them first ─ especially the

Hi everyone ✋ In the previous post we learned about smart pointers ─ the modern, safe way to handle dynamic memory. At the very end, I promised we’d look at something that sounds a little dizzying ─ pointers to pointers 😵‍💫 If you haven’t read the earlier posts in this series, please go through them

Hi everyone ✋ In the previous post we learned dynamic memory allocation ─ how new grabs memory from the heap and delete gives it back. We also met two scary dangers ─ the memory leak (forgetting to delete) and the dangling pointer (using memory after delete). At the very end, we got a little taste

Hi everyone ✋ In the previous post we learned the fascinating relationship between pointers and functions ─ how a function has an address, and how we can pass behavior around like data. If you haven’t read the earlier posts in this series, please go through them first ─ today everything we’ve learned about pointers finally