Qt UI Classes - Smart Pointers vs Raw Pointers

When I ask Qt Creator to generate a new UI class for me, then it references the ui class via a raw pointer, rather than via a smart pointer. I asked Peppe (Giuseppe D'Angelo) if there were any value in me fixing this in all my code. As always, the answer was much more involving than originally anticipated, and very enlightening. Among other things we discussed why you still need to have the destructor implemented in the source file, despite it being empty.

00:00 Welcome

00:33 Isn't Qt Creator generating the wrong template for me?

01:46 Understanding the generated code

03:32 But shouldn't it be a unique_ptr?

05:39 but but but, the idea with a unique_ptr is that I need a destructor, so why do I need a destructor?

09:43 The empty destructor

12:04 The rule of five!

13:03 what does "=default" do?

13:47 Why not just have the Ui: Dialog on the stack?

Links:

• Introduction to Qt Designer
• QWAM episode on precompiled headers
• The example code showcased in this video is available here
• All Qt Widgets and more videos