I have an application which creates objects of a certain kind (let's say, of "Foo" class) during execution, to track some statistics, and insert them into one or both of two STL maps, say:
map<Foo*, int> map1;
map<Foo*, int> map2;
I was wondering what is the best way to delete the Foo objects. At the moment my solution is to iterate over map1 and map2, and put the Foo pointers into a set, then interating on this set and call delete on each.
Is there a more effective way, possibly using auto_ptr? If so how, since auto_ptr<> objects can't be stored in STL containers?
Thanks in advance.
auto_ptr objects cannot, as you say, be stored in STL containers. I like to use the shared_ptr object (from boost) for this purpose. It is a referenced counted pointer, so the object will be deleted once only, when it goes out of scope.
typedef<shared_ptr<Foo>, int> Map;
Map map1;
Map map2;
Now, you just add and remove from map1 and map2, shared_ptr objects as they were pointers, and they will take care of the deletion, when the last reference is removed.