Right, but unless your Base or Derived class is going to pass Base*/&s to friends and/or other instances, you typically don't want your protected destructors to

Right, but unless your Base or Derived class is going to pass Base*/&s to friends and/or other instances, you typically don't want your protected destructors to be virtual just so you can get safe destruction. Of course, the thing with C++ is, the longer you sit and think about it, the more reasons you can come up with a reason to do something atypical Slicing isn't even necessarily harmful either... but I'm not sure what you had in mind.