Introduction
This bug appears in VC6 SP3, and possibly earlier versions as well.
When inheriting from a virtual base class the access specifier for the
destructor is ignored
To demonstrate, if the word virtual is commented out as shown below in
the declaration of class B, this program correctly produces the error
message
xxx.cpp(28) : error C2248: 'B::~B' : cannot
access protected member declared in class 'B'
xxx.cpp(23) : see declaration of 'B::~B'
If the word virtual is un-commented then the program builds without error
messages despite the destructor being declared private
The offending code
#include "stdafx.h"
class A {
protected:
~A() {}
};
class B : virtual public A {
private:
~B() {}
};
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
B b;
return 0;
}
As a bit of history, I am implementing some smart pointers and want to
ensure that the smart-pointer target object cannot be created locally on
the stack, nor do I want to be able to explicitly call delete on a pointer
to such an object. Hence I want the destructor to be private. However,
this fails (as shown above) when I am inheriting from a virtual base class.
