TDPL: Manual invocation of destructor

Andrej Mitrovic andrej.mitrovich at gmail.com
Sun Aug 8 11:09:14 PDT 2010


On Page 187 it states (shortened here for convenience):
"By calling clear(b), you invoke b's destructor, obliterate the object's state with Buffer.init, and call Buffer's default constructor"

On the next page there's a unittest, and the entire example is this:

import core.stdc.stdlib;

class Buffer
{
    private void* data;
    
    // constructor
    this()
    {
        data = malloc(1024);
    }
    
    // destructor
    ~this()
    {
        free(data);
    }
}

unittest
{
    auto b = new Buffer;
    auto b1 = b;    // extra alias for b
    clear(b);
    assert(b1.data is null);
}

void main() { }

The assert fails, regardless if there is another reference to the object or not (b1 in this case).

I've added some writeln()'s (not shown here), and just like the book said, after clear(b), b's destructor gets called, the fields get initialized to .init, and then b's constructor gets called. But the constructor will allocate memory for b1.data again, which means data is not null anymore. 

So I'm guessing the assert code is wrong in the example?


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