Singleton Destructors

Question

Should Singleton objects that don\'t use instance/reference counters be considered memory leaks in C++?

Without a counter that calls for explicit deletion of the singlet

Answer 1

It's folklore to free global memory allocations explicitly before the application terminates. I suppose most of us do it out of habit and because we feel it's sort of bad to "forget" about a structure. In the C world it's a law of symmetry that any allocation must have a deallocation somewhere. C++ programmers think differently if they know and practice RAII.

In the good old days of e.g. AmigaOS there were REAL memory leaks. When you forgot to deallocate memory, it would NEVER become accessible again until the system was reset.

I don't know of any self-respecting desktop operating system these days that would allow memory leaks to creep out of an application's virtual address space. Your mileage may vary on embedded devices when there is no extensive memory bookkeeping.