MFC Programmer's SourceBook : Thinking in C++
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Destructors and virtual destructors

Constructors cannot be made explicitly virtual (and the technique in Appendix B only simulates virtual constructors), but destructors can and often must be virtual.

The constructor has the special job of putting an object together piece-by-piece, first by calling the base constructor, then the more derived constructors in order of inheritance. Similarly, the destructor also has a special job – it must disassemble an object that may belong to a hierarchy of classes. To do this, the compiler generates code that calls all the destructors, but in the reverse order that they are called by the constructor. That is, the destructor starts at the most-derived class and works its way down to the base class. This is the safe and desirable thing to do: The current destructor always knows that the base-class members are alive and active because it knows what it is derived from. Thus, the destructor can perform its own cleanup, then call the next-down destructor, which will perform its own cleanup, knowing what it is derived from, but not what is derived from it.

You should keep in mind that constructors and destructors are the only places where this hierarchy of calls must happen (and thus the proper hierarchy is automatically generated by the compiler). In all other functions, only that function will be called, whether it’s virtual or not. The only way for base-class versions of the same function to be called in ordinary functions (virtual or not) is if you explicitly call that function.

Normally, the action of the destructor is quite adequate. But what happens if you want to manipulate an object through a pointer to its base class (that is, manipulate the object through its generic interface)? This is certainly a major objective in object-oriented programming. The problem occurs when you want to delete a pointer of this type for an object that has been created on the heap with new. If the pointer is to the base class, the compiler can only know to call the base-class version of the destructor during delete. Sound familiar? This is the same problem that virtual functions were created to solve for the general case. Fortunately virtual functions work for destructors as they do for all other functions except constructors.

Even though the destructor, like the constructor, is an “exceptional” function, it is possible for the destructor to be virtual because the object already knows what type it is (whereas it doesn’t during construction). Once an object has been constructed, its VPTR is initialized, so virtual function calls can take place.

For a time, pure virtual destructors were legal and worked if you combined them with a function body, but in the final C++ standard function bodies combined with pure virtual functions were outlawed. This means that a virtual destructor cannot be pure, and must have a function body because (unlike ordinary functions) all destructors in a class hierarchy are always called. Here’s an example: 

//: C15:Pvdest.cpp
// Pure virtual destructors
// require a function body.
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

class Base {
public:
  virtual ~Base() {
    cout << "~Base()" << endl;
  }
};

class Derived : public Base {
public:
  ~Derived() {
    cout << "~Derived()" << endl;
  }
};

int main() {
  Base* bp = new Derived; // Upcast
  delete bp; // Virtual destructor call
} ///:~

As a guideline, any time you have a virtual function in a class, you should immediately add a virtual destructor (even if it does nothing). This way, you ensure against any surprises later.

Virtuals in destructors

There’s something that happens during destruction that you might not immediately expect. If you’re inside an ordinary member function and you call a virtual function, that function is called using the late-binding mechanism. This is not true with destructors, virtual or not. Inside a destructor, only the “local” version of the member function is called; the virtual mechanism is ignored.

Why is this? Suppose the virtual mechanism were used inside the destructor. Then it would be possible for the virtual call to resolve to a function that was “further out” (more derived) on the inheritance hierarchy than the current destructor. But destructors are called from the “outside in” (from the most-derived destructor down to the base destructor), so the actual function called would rely on portions of an object that has already been destroyed ! Thus, the compiler resolves the calls at compile-time and calls only the “local” version of the function. Notice that the same is true for the constructor (as described earlier), but in the constructor’s case the information wasn’t available, whereas in the destructor the information (that is, the VPTR) is there, but is isn’t reliable.

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