Idea for improvement to g++ - warning

[Kendrick Hamilton <hamilton at sedsystems dot ca>]

Hello,

I had an idea of a warning g++ might be able to add. The purpose of the 
warning is to help prevent bugs. The warning is to occur when you might 
destroy an inherited class using the base classes pointer. To illustrate 
consider

class base
{
    public:
        base();
        ~base();
};

class inherit : public base
{
    public:
        inherit();
        ~inherit();
}

Note that the base class's destructor is not virtual.

Creating a derived class from a base class when the base class' 
destructor is not virtual could be enough to generate the warning. A 
more elaborate version would issue the warning if a pointer to the base 
class was assigned the address of a derived class when the base class' 
destructor is not virtual (base *b = new inherit()).

Just an idea to consider. I spent a while trying to debug random crashes 
in code where the author forgot to mark the destructors as virtual.

Kendrick Hamilton