I’m trying to understand under what circumstances a variable should be declared as a pointer. For example, what would guide a programmer to choose between the following two ways of declaring a histogram? TH1D *h = new TH1D("h","h",10,0,10); TH1D h("h","h",10,0,10); I understand the difference in …

Well, sadly with ROOT there’s a bit more to it: Many ROOT 6 objects prefer heap allocation: new and pointers, due to ROOT’s traditional memory management (e.g. the file owning the histograms). We are moving away from that; all of ROOT’s new and future classes (RDataFrame, RHist, RCanvas, RNtuple et…

Wile_E_Coyote August 23, 2019, 4:49am 2

When should you declare variables as pointers, and when shouldn't you?