How to delete an object of a polymorphic class type that has no virtual destructor

Question

I am getting the following error when I try to compile some code from a Third-party SDK.

*Description    Resource    Path    Location    Type
deleting object of          


        

Answer 1

Well it's a bug in the third-party SDK. Any class that is used as a base class should have a virtual destructor. Otherwise, when you delete a pointer to the base of a derived class instance, the derived class's destructor won't be called.

One way around it is to not delete pointers to the base. Instead, use dynamic_cast to get a pointer to the derived class (this might be inconvenient if there are many classes derived from that base).