Why doesn the construct-on-first-use idiom use a static object instead of a static pointer?
Short answer: it’s possible to use a static object rather than a static pointer, but doing so opens up another (equally subtle, equally nasty) problem. Long answer: sometimes people worry about the fact that the previous solution “leaks.” In many cases, this is not a problem, but it is a problem in some cases. Note: even though the object pointed to by ans in the previous FAQ is never deleted, the memory doesn’t actually “leak” when the program exits since the operating system automatically reclaims all the memory in a program’s heap when that program exits. In other words, the only time you’d need to worry about this is when the destructor for the Fred object performs some important action (such as writing something to a file) that must occur sometime while the program is exiting.
