Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

Is there any benefit to using new?

+7
−0

I've heard that in modern C++, smart pointers are preferred to raw pointers for ownership (the so-called RAII principle, as I understand it).

This makes sense, and since then I've always used them throughout my projects. This makes me realize though, that I can't really remember the last time I've used new to allocate anything and have started to wonder if it's actually useful anymore.

In what (if any) situations are there benefits in using new to allocate memory over std::make_unique or std::make_shared?

History
Why does this post require moderator attention?
You might want to add some details to your flag.
Why should this post be closed?

0 comment threads

1 answer

+3
−0

Well, you still need (placement) new for the implementation of the smart pointers themselves.

You would also use it (or malloc) to implement custom allocators, for example: https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_78_0/libs/pool/doc/html/boost/default_user_allocator_new_delete.html.

One unusual scenario is the following: Just recently I was involved in the implementation of a component that had a special requirement, namely that some of its objects should have "infinite" life time. These objects should therefore also not be destroyed at the end of main, but exist up to the point of actual process termination. Therefore, what was needed there was a new without delete.

Maybe others have more examples - at least I can confirm your view that the use of new has almost completely disappeared from source code.

History
Why does this post require moderator attention?
You might want to add some details to your flag.

1 comment thread

Yeah, I believe that's exactly it. Smart pointers are prefered, but such things are implemented with ... (1 comment)

Sign up to answer this question »