Synopsis

A memory location allocated with new [] is deleted with delete or free.

Enabled by default

Yes

Severity/Certainty

High/High

Full description

A memory location allocated with the new [] operator is deleted with the delete operator. Use the delete [] operator instead. The consequence of using delete is that only the array element directly pointed to will be deallocated, as if it were allocated with the singular new operator. This will most likely cause a memory leak. If free is used the resulting behavior will be undefined, because there is no guarantee that new invokes malloc.

Coding standards

Code examples

The following code example fails the check and will give a warning:

int main(void)
{
  int *p = new int[10];
  delete p; //should be delete[]

  return 0;
}

The following code example passes the check and will not give a warning about this issue:

int main(void)
{
  int *p = new int[10];
  delete [] p;

  return 0;
}