Richard Damon [Richard@Damon-family.org] wrote:
Lex,
If you really want bla to point to fooInstance then you need to use
bla.reset(&fooInstance)
BUT there are several condition that need to be satisfied or you have just set a time bomb in your program.
1st, fooInstance needs to be on the heap, and created by new. Your example code has fooInstance being a non-heap object, either on the stack if the declaration was in a function, or a global. This will lead to undefined behavior as soon as bla no longer points to fooInstance, or when bla goes out of scope, as the shared_ptr will try to delete something which was not new'ed
I've had the op's situation myself. My solution to making a shared pointer reference a static object is to define a function called "NullDelete", then pass NullDelete as a second parameter to the shared pointer. This prevents the shared pointer from attempting to delete a statically allocated object. Do avoid letting a shared pointer reference a stack object, as you can have dangling shared pointers when the object goes out of scope. Sample code follows: void NullDelete (void const *) { //Intentionally blank } Option 1: static Foo static_foo1; boost::shared_ptr <Foo> bar1 (&static_foo1, &NullDelete); Option 2: static Foo static_foo2; boost::shared_ptr <Foo> bar2; Bar2 = boost::shared_ptr <Foo> (&static_foo2, &NullDelete); Option 1: static Foo static_foo3; boost::shared_ptr <Foo> bar3; Bar3.reset (&static_foo3, &NullDelete);