Summary

In this chapter, we explored the lifetime of variables - both automatic and dynamic, where they are stored, and when they are destructed. We then used this information to develop RAII techniques that allow us to almost ignore resource management because the automatic variables will clean them up when they are destructed even in the presence of an exception. Then, we looked at throwing exceptions and catching them so that we can deal with abnormal conditions at the right level. From RAII, we went into a discussion on the ownership of resources and how STL smart pointers help us in this area. We discovered that just about everything is treated as a function call, thus allowing operator overloading and implicit conversions. We discovered the wonderful (or is it awful?) world of argument-dependent lookup (ADL) and how it can potentially trip us up in the future. We now have a good understanding of the fundamental features of C++. In the next chapter we will start to explore function...