Dynamical objects (by operator new) in Qt

[wysota]

I do create actions as children of this.

Children and members are two distinct things.

But why does deleting them in the MainWindow destructor not cause a memory fault?

Why would it?

If the action instances were in fact first-class children of the MainWindow instance, shouldn't they have already been deleted by the QObject system before it gets to my destructor?

Think what is the order of destructor calls when using C++ inheritance.

And by "member variable" I meant that the member variable is a QAction *, not QAction.

Here a pointer to an object is a member variable, not the object itself. You can have 10 pointers pointing to the same object and all these can be member variables of different objects. The pointed object doesn't have to be a member variable of any object.