Re: [Boost-users] How & when to use weak_ptr

Hmm -- so I guess, in the cases I'm talking about, I should store a shared_ptr, and just return a const refererence.

Note that it might be rather dangerous, if your caller would store such a const reference.

Then, if I need to have a copy of the member elsewhere to manipulate, I could return a weak_ptr.

Returning weak_ptr usually doesn't make sense (except for the case where you return it for tracking only). Note that shared_ptr is implicitly convertible to weak_ptr, so typically you return shared_ptr, and let the caller to decide what to do with it: if the caller indends to store it, but doesn't want strong referencing, it stores it as weak_ptr.