So far, you’ve learned how to create and use objects. But there’s another part of the object lifecycle we need to cover: how to destroy them! Muahahaha.

It’s actually far less nefarious than it sounds; object destruction is really about tidying up and preventing memory leaks. A destructor is a special method that handles object destruction. Like a constructor, it has the same name as the class and no return type, but is preceded by a ~ operator and takes no parameters:

// city.hpp
class City {

  std::string name;
  int population;

public:
  City(std::string new_name, int new_pop);
  ~City();
};

// city.cpp
City::~City() {

  // any final cleanup

}

Inside, you add any housekeeping that needs to happen before the object is destroyed. You generally won’t need to call a destructor; the destructor will be called automatically in any of the following scenarios:

• The object moves out of scope.
• The object is explicitly deleted.
• When the program ends.