From: Bjorn.Karlsson_at_[hidden]
Date: 2002-03-25 05:17:01
> From: Juan Carlos Arevalo-Baeza
> This is why I devised a different manner of initialization
> on my (yes, I use my own, like many others) smart pointer library.
I find this quite interesting - what is (are) the reason(s) for rolling your
own rather than using the Boost smart pointers?
> When a smart pointer is given a preallocated pointer, it
> assumes that someone already owns it, and wants to share this
> ownership, so the reference counter is initialized to 2
> instead of 1. This gets rid of E's original problem.
Yes, but of course, this is just a different tradeoff - if I understand the
semantics of your smart pointer correctly, a common mistake would be
your_shared_ptr<std::string> p(new std::string("I will never be deleted!"));
While this too could be alleviated by forcing the use of different
initialization functions depending on the required semantics, the
unfortunate side-effect is that usage (IMHO) becomes less intuitive.
By the way, how is the reference counter shared between the owners when the
unadorned pointer walks alone?
Bjorn Karlsson