Destructor (Computer Science) (Paperback)

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In object-oriented programming, a destructor (sometimes shortened to dtor) is a method which is automatically invoked when the object is destroyed. Its main purpose is to clean up and to free the resources which were acquired by the object along its life cycle and unlink it from other objects or resources invalidating any references in the process. The use of destructors is key to the concept of Resource Acquisition Is Initialization. In binary programs compiled with the GNU C Compiler, special table sections called .dtors are made for destructors. This table contains an array of addresses to the relavant functions that are called when the main() function exits.