Lesson learned: if you're going to derive a class in c++, make sure to declare a virtual destructor on the base class!

I just fixed (one of...) the massive memory leaks in my damn project.

Pictured: the strings in a derived class actually getting freed!

I also learned about taking heap snapshots and how to read them. Cool stuff!

@AlgoRythm oh you remind me of yet another reason to never touch C++ again.
Too many traps.

yeah i remember that was one of these gotchas with destructors in C++

just checking that you're using valgrind to investigate this and will never ever stop using it in the future

the worst part about this is that the compiler won't give a shit about it, even if it can directly detect this.

Edit: clang-tidy has a warning for that, might be interesting (https://clang.llvm.org/extra/...)

@Hazarth I’m using smart pointers, lots of shared ownership too, will it work well in this case?

@Hazarth valgrind is super useful in general 👌
but definitely a must have for C++

@AlgoRythm the word is, it's as smart as a smart phone. pick your poison

@AlgoRythm chances are it will at least notice something is wrong and warn you, giving you a rough idea where it happens. Even if smart pointers can be a bit harder to trace, valgrind has ways to help you. For example the heap profiler might come in handy to see which objects are being allocated a lot. It's one of the best tools for a c++ dev, hands down

@Hazarth Yeah, I used the visual studio heap profiler and it's a really good diagnostic tool

Our prof used to beat us if we were caught with any memory leaks in our code

C++ allows you to customize your classes by picking individual answers to questions like:

- do you want polymorphism?
- should polymorphism actually work?
- should the subclasses leak?

@lorentz oh I have a good one too: do you want schroedingers polymorphism? Then just implement the public virtual functions as private and see what happens!

@LotsOfCaffeine is it undefined? I want to know! 😂

@LotsOfCaffeine subscribed to question

@LotsOfCaffeine I can't fathom why this is legal. It has literally no legitimate use cases.

@lorentz Well maybe the derived class is more modest than it's predecessors?? It won't just open up its virtual functions for any old object that asks?

@Lensflare not sure if it's undefined, but it is definetly weird

https://godbolt.org/z/nra1Gv8oY

@LotsOfCaffeine just added __PRETTY_FUNCTION__ to my list of things I know. Looks like it might me a gcc-only extension though.

Edit: in visual c++ __FUNCSIG__

@AlgoRythm yeah its gnu specific, though I think clang has something with a similar name

__FUNCTION__ is standard, though I think it stems from C and is only the functions name, not the return type, class, namespace, template arguments, etc