Since I joined Dell, my main field of research and work has somewhat changed. Now I am mostly working with C++ and file-systems. This world is not entirely new to me, but apparently I have a lot of stuff to learn.
Today I’d like to talk about one nice trick that I learned few days ago.
When working with large software systems, memory management becomes an imperative. In C, you can easily allocate a large chunk of memory and allocate structure right on that buffer. This is by far more difficult in C++, because compiler has to call consturctor.
Apparently, you can, in a way, directly call object’s constructor . I.e. you can allocate an object, on specified memory region, without actually allocating this region.
This is how you do it.
char* s = new char[1024]; SomeClass* p = new (s) SomeClass;
First new operator just allocates 1024 bytes. This is good old allocation as we know it. Note the special syntax of the second new operator. It allocates the new object on memory specified in brackets. Basically, this calls SomeClass’s constructor using s as storage.
One thing that I don’t know how to do is how to call destructor on the object – i.e. how to delete an object in place.
Related posts:
- Direct IO in Python
- One sane voice in the crowd
- Recursively deleting symbolic link and what it points to
