Using typeid to get name of derived class

Question

I\'m creating a resource manager that takes in classes derived from the class Resource. My problem is that typeid(..).name() returns the wrong name of the class.

Answer 1

The typeid operator can only return the dynamic type of an expression, if that expression is a glvalue to an object of a polymorphic class.

A class is polymorphic if it defines at least one virtual member function, directly or in one of its bases.

Since your Resource class and the derived classes don't satisfy this requirement, the typeid operator can only access the static type.

To solve that, and issues that you will run into as soon as you try to delete a pointer to such a resource, make the destructor virtual.