"Beman Dawes" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message [EMAIL PROTECTED]">news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]... > At 04:25 PM 1/24/2003, Jeffrey Yasskin wrote: > > >Just out of curiosity, which boost libraries are likely to be proposed to > >the committee? > > See http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2002/n1397.html
This is yet another bad PR move, but then I thought, if voicing an opinion around here constitutes a problem, then the problem is not mine. So here goes. The smart pointer proposal is unconvincing to me. This, of course, comes at no surprise. There's some conjecture in the reference document at http://www.boost.org/libs/smart_ptr/shared_ptr.htm such as "The support for custom deallocators does not impose significant overhead" or "My opinion is that the added functionality is worth the cost" etc. Not what one would like to hear about a one-size-fits-most standard library implementation. On to the FAQ. (I will skip over the first three Q&A with which I totally disagree.) Q.Why doesn't shared_ptr provide a release() function? A.shared_ptr cannot give away ownership unless it's unique() because the other copy will still destroy the object. The answer doesn't answer the question. The next natural question is, "ok, but if the pointer is unique(), can I benefit of a release() function that returns a bool telling me whether the release worked or not?" It turns out that in COM the need of relinquishing ownership back to the system (or another entity) is a common case. Has anyone used shared_ptr with COM extensively? Q. Why doesn't shared_ptr provide (your pet feature here)? A. Because (your pet feature here) would mandate a reference counted implementation or a linked list implementation, or some other specific implementation. This is not the intent. This is a presupposition. Someone wants to mandate lazy initialization/specific dereference testing/specific initialization testing/tons others. Would any of these require a refcounted/reflinked implementation? Andrei _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe & other changes: http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost
