Leak 6

Leak #6

Missing overloaded assignment operator. The memory leakage problem associated with a missing overloaded assignment operator is similar to the problem associated with the missing copy constructor. When an operator is used on an object of a class, the compiler (or linker) will generate an error if that operator is not overloaded for that class. The C++ language makes an exception with the assignment operator. If the user does not specify its functionality, then C++ guesses that the user wants to perform a memberwise copy (bitwise copy in versions 1.2 and earlier). If the class is variable- sized , then the result is memory leakage. The actual leakage occurs when the object on the left-hand side of the assignment operator has its internal address overlayed with the internal address of the object on the right-hand side of the operator. The memory to which the left-hand side points is no longer referenced but is still allocated. In addition, the two operand objects point at the same dynamically allocated memory (see Figure B.2). This will probably cause heap corruption when the destructor for the class is invoked by each object (at some later execution time) and each invocation attempts to delete the same address.

Figure B.2. Memory leakage due to a missing assignment operator.