Delete or not after copy/load

Question

That's probably a trick question, but I'm not sure;

Do I have to call delete after :

• QImage::copy()
• QImage::load(QString)
• QPixmap::fromImage(QImage)

By delete I mean, deleting it when I don't need it any more.

Answer 1

QImage objects are not special in how they are created and destroyed. On the stack or with new/delete or whatever, the rules are the same as for all C++ objects.

QImage is implicitly shared, so copying it is cheap (like a shared pointer) but it performs copy-on-write to preserve value semantics.

Short story, you probably don't ever have to new/delete a QImage, just pass it around as a value and quit worrying.

You don't have to do any special deleting after calling copy/load methods, although you might want to assign my_image=QImage() to release cached data or something.