Is it possible to delete a non-new object?

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Yes, there will be adverse effects.

You must not delete an object that was not allocated with new. If the object was allocated on the stack, your compiler has already generated a call to its destructor at the end of its scope. This means you will call the destructor twice, with potentially very bad effects.

Besides calling the destructor twice, you will also attempt to deallocate a memory block that was never allocated. The new operator presumably puts the objects on the heap; delete expects to find the object in the same region the new operator puts them. However, your object that was not allocated with new lives on the stack. This will very probably crash your program (if it does not already crash after calling the destructor a second time).

You’ll also get in deep trouble if your Object on the heap lives longer than your Object on the stack: you’ll get a dangling reference to somewhere on the stack, and you’ll get incorrect results/crash the next time you access it.

The general rule I see is that stuff that live on the stack can reference stuff that lives on the heap, but stuff on the heap should not reference stuff on the stack because of the very high chances that they’ll outlive stack objects. And pointers to both should not be mixed together.

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