Cleaning up a widget

What this C++ resource-management interview question tests

This is a medium-difficulty C++ question that probes your understanding of object lifecycle, constructor and destructor semantics, and how the language handles cleanup when objects go out of scope. It's the kind of problem quant firms use to verify that a candidate thinks clearly about memory and resource ownership—critical in performance-sensitive systems.

To answer correctly, you need to trace the order in which constructors and destructors run, understand when temporary objects are created and destroyed, and reason about the state of objects at each point in the program flow. The question rewards careful reading of the code and precise knowledge of C++ language rules rather than guesswork.

• Constructor and destructor invocation order
• Scope and lifetime of objects
• Temporary object creation and destruction
• Copy semantics and move semantics