Chapter 9. Templates and Commonly Used Containers

In Chapter 7, Dynamic Memory Allocation, we spoke about how you will use dynamic memory allocation if you want to create a new array whose size isn't known at compile time. Dynamic memory allocations are of the form int * array = new int[ number_of_elements ].

You also saw that dynamic allocations using the new[] keyword require you to call delete[] on the array later, otherwise you'd have a memory leak. Having to manage memory this way is hard work.

Is there a way to create an array of dynamic size and have the memory automatically managed for you by C++? The answer is yes. There are C++ object types (commonly called containers) that handle dynamic memory allocations and deallocations automatically. UE4 provides a couple of container types to store your data in dynamically resizable collections.

There are two different groups of template containers. There is the UE4 family of containers (beginning with T*) and the C++ Standard...