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patterncppCritical

Is it safe to delete a NULL pointer?

Submitted by: @import:stackoverflow-api··
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safedeletepointernull

Problem

Is it safe to delete a NULL pointer?

And is it a good coding style?

Solution

delete performs the check anyway, so checking it on your side adds overhead and looks uglier. A very good practice is setting the pointer to NULL after delete (helps avoiding double deletion and other similar memory corruption problems).

I'd also love if delete by default was setting the parameter to NULL like in

#define my_delete(x) {delete x; x = NULL;}


(I know about R and L values, but wouldn't it be nice?)

Code Snippets

#define my_delete(x) {delete x; x = NULL;}

Context

Stack Overflow Q#4190703, score: 319

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