Why should I declare a virtual destructor for an abstract class in C++?
The answer to your question is often, but not always. If your abstract class forbids clients to call delete on a pointer to it (or if it says so in its documentation), you are free to not declare a virtual destructor.
You can forbid clients to call delete on a pointer to it by making its destructor protected. Working like this, it is perfectly safe and reasonable to omit a virtual destructor.
You will eventually end up with no virtual method table, and end up signalling your clients your intention on making it non-deleteable through a pointer to it, so you have indeed reason not to declare it virtual in those cases.
[See item 4 in this article: http://www.gotw.ca/publications/mill18.htm]
It's even more important for an interface. Any user of your class will probably hold a pointer to the interface, not a pointer to the concrete implementation. When they come to delete it, if the destructor is non-virtual, they will call the interface's destructor (or the compiler-provided default, if you didn't specify one), not the derived class's destructor. Instant memory leak.
For example
class Interface
{
virtual void doSomething() = 0;
};
class Derived : public Interface
{
Derived();
~Derived()
{
// Do some important cleanup...
}
};
void myFunc(void)
{
Interface* p = new Derived();
// The behaviour of the next line is undefined. It probably
// calls Interface::~Interface, not Derived::~Derived
delete p;
}