From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-11-17 15:58:03
At 02:49 PM 11/17/2003, Matthew Wilson wrote:
>> > [As a side question, is it true that Nicolai Josuttis was the
>> > inventor of the technique?]
>>
>> Which specific technique do you have in mind?
>
>Not the general principle of having the reference-count external to the
>counted type, but the specific technique of having it a heap-allocated
>(integer) instance. That seems, to me anyway, the essence of the
>shared_ptr,
>and the bit that's conceptually beautiful (albeit potentially slightly
>inefficient).
Greg Colvin invented that technique, AFAIK. The template used to be called
counted_ptr.
See the second page of
http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/1994/N0555.pdf for a paper
Greg wrote in 1994. I think there was also an earlier paper by him, but I'm
not able to find a copy.
--Beman