Cleanup for heap arrays

C++ arrays are allocated on the heap using operator new[]. The cleanup rules for such arrays are as follows:

• if it is not necessary to protect against leaves, such as if the array is a class member, or no leaves can occur in the lifetime of the array, then always delete the array using operator delete[] (not operator delete).

• if it is necessary to protect against leaves, push the array to the cleanup stack using the utility template function CleanupArrayDeletePushL(). This ensures that if a leave occurs, the array is deleted correctly using operator delete[].

  Arrays should not be pushed to the cleanup stack using the standard CleanupStack::PushL(), as this will result in operator delete rather than operator delete[] being used for cleanup.

Note on compiler behaviour

Of the compilers used with Symbian OS, Metrowerks CodeWarrior is the most sensitive to the rules for array deletion. If an array is deleted with a simple delete rather than delete[], then a USER 42 panic (invalid heap cell) can occur.

(This panic in fact occurs for arrays in which the class has either a constructor or a destructor. For such arrays, CodeWarrior reserves space at the start of the array storage to hold the number of elements in the array: this means the first heap cell is not the start of a deletable object. GCC and MSVC C++ only reserve such extra space if the class has a destructor.)