THINK++ — Engineering Visualized

Cleanup

Destructors

A special member function that is automatically called when an object is destroyed. Its main job is to release resources (like heap memory) that the object acquired during its lifetime.

SYNTAX

class MyClass {
public:
    ~MyClass() {
        // Cleanup code here
        cout << "Object destroyed";
    }
};

The tilde ~ symbol prefix indicates a destructor.

NO ARGUMENTS

A destructor cannot take any arguments. You can only have ONE destructor per class.

NO RETURN TYPE

Like constructors, destructors have no return type.

When is it called?

When a local object goes out of scope
When delete is called on a pointer to an object
When the program terminates (for global/static objects)

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