Question

http://ideone.com/zBPzc why was "Goodbye, World!" only printed once?

Answer 1

http://ideone.com/REaCY here it's printed twice!

Answer 2

Looks like a race condition during program termination. In the first case, the program terminated before the output from the destructor of the class Ball had a chance to make it to the output stream.

Answer 3

right; taking away the delete gives me this: http://ideone.com/VHDOT

Answer 4

what if I make the balls static objects? I think it will work fine.

Answer 5

http://ideone.com/JzRRO

Answer 6

now I get it... it's because I never call ball2's destructor in my original post (both ball1 and ball2 are dynamically allocated)

Answer 7

whereas in my last example ( http://ideone.com/JzRRO) as soon as main terminates their destructors are called.

Answer 8

called automatically*

Answer 9

the order in which static objects are deleted is not usually well defined.
it also goes against the principals of good programming practices.

Answer 10

right.... so how do I make sure, say, the static ball1 is deleted before the static ball2?

Answer 11

delete ball1;
delete ball2;

Answer 12

anyway... my example probably breaks 10 different C++ proper practices (using this in class methods, etc.)

Answer 13

if you are familiar with them, then you may want to consider using the shared pointers provided by the boost library to manage memory for you.

Answer 14

I'm still in like the first few chapters of my C++ primer book. I'm sure I will eventually learn about proper coding practices (RAII, etc)

Answer 15

I only have the 4th edition though... so I'm sure there's probably something new that isn't covered :(

Answer 16

ok - good. I guess you have to be shown the bad practices first in order to fully appreciate the good ones. :)

Answer 17

I might want to get this new book: http://www.amazon.com/Primer-5th-Stanley-B-Lippman/dp/0321714113 which will release after half a year :-P

Answer 18

http://ideone.com/oRc3z C++ is acting strange now :(