Trees without explicit memory management

[Dave]

Hello all,

I am creating arbitrary trees and would like to not have to deal with memory
management. The approach I've taken is to put each node in a std::list<>.
Obviously, the nodes will be deallocated when the list is destroyed or when
I call clear(). This approach works because my nodes can have simple
pointers to parent / children / siblings since the elements in a list never
move. Can anybody see any shortcomings in this approach or offer a superior
alternative?

Thanks,
Dave

 

[bartek]

I am creating arbitrary trees and would like to not have to deal with
memory management. The approach I've taken is to put each node in a
std::list<>. Obviously, the nodes will be deallocated when the list is
destroyed or when I call clear(). This approach works because my
nodes can have simple pointers to parent / children / siblings since
the elements in a list never move. Can anybody see any shortcomings
in this approach or offer a superior alternative?

You could use a deque as well -- if you know you won't need to remove
elements in the middle of the sequence. A list gives you flexibility to
unlink middle elements w/o risk of losing references though with a little
more memory overhead. Myself ended up using deques in a ternary search tree
implementation.

Cheers!
b