Hi everyone ✋ In the previous post we stared down the dark side of pointers ─ wild and dangling pointers ─ and saw that the cleanest cure for most of them is to let smart pointers own our memory. We first met smart pointers back in the smart pointers post, where unique_ptr and shared_ptr did […]
Smart Pointers Part 2 Read More »
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
Dangling and Wild Pointers Read More »
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
Pointers to Members Read More »
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
Member Access with the Arrow Operator Read More »
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
Pointers to Pointers Read More »
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