Yet Another Way to Defeat C++ const

One of my favorite C++ features, and one I feel is terribly underutilized in many code bases, is the const mechanism. It’s a great mechanism for defining dual roles for the same object type: a mutable and (ideally) non-mutable one. But as useful as const is it’s also very easy to circumvent and I’m always interested in learning new ways to do so.

While navigating through a stackoverflow question yesterday I came across yet another way to defeat C++ const. In C++ it’s perfectly legal to call delete on a const value. This code path though transitions from a const * to a type to a non-const pointer by means of ‘this’in the destructor code. From there it’s possible to call any other mutable method in the type and bypass the original const without any nasty casts. For example

class Example {
public:
    ~Example() {
        MutableMethod();
    }

    void MutableMethod() {
        cout << "Example::MutableMethod()" << endl;
    }

    void ConstMethod() const {
        delete this;
    }
};

With this type I can easily defeat **const **restrictions by simply deleting it

const Example* pLocal = new Example();
pLocal->ConstMethod();

Granted this is not terribly useful when considering the **const **of the immediate type. It’s being deleted after all so messing around in it is unlikely to cause too much of a fuss. However it can be interesting when considering the access of nested members within the type which may live longer than the container being deleted.