On Tue, Jul 29, 2014 at 9:01 PM, Michael Powell <mwpowellhtx@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Jul 29, 2014 at 11:30 AM, Michael Powell <mwpowellhtx@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 29, 2014 at 11:25 AM, Chris Cleeland
> <chris.cleeland@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Jul 29, 2014 at 11:02 AM, Michael Powell <mwpowellhtx@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Along the lines what Edward suggested, if the "origin" of the pointer
>>> is your thread, then somehow you need to make sure that memory lives
>>> beyond the lifetime of the external, in this case C, API, context and
>>> all, etc, etc. No room for debate in that topic; it is what it is,
>>> deal with it in a responsible manner.
>
> The C API is not managing the life time of the instance allocated to
> the shared_ptr. When the shared_ptr<> falls out of scope, all bets are
> off. Plain and simple.

Not to beat a dead horse. But here's an apt analogy: I could be wrong,
but you are dividing by zero and not expecting a div by zero exception
(or worse) to occur.

That's actually a completely incorrect analogy. We are obviously having a disconnect between the explanation I'm giving for what I'm attempting to deal with and your understanding of it. I could tell earlier today that this had occurred, but with a schedule deadline looming I didn't think it was worth wrestling with the so-called pig (to use another analogy that may or may not be correct).

You seem to think that I want to abdicate responsibility for managing the lifecycle, and that's completely the OPPOSITE of what I want to do. The whole reason I raised the question in the first place is because I recognize and WANT to deal with lifecycle responsibilities. Ideally, the container behind the C API would participate in bumping the reference count on my pointer, but that's not realistic because (a) it's not my API--it's from a vendor and not open source and (b) it's C and participating in shared_ptr<> refcount semantics in C does not look trivial.

So, I am left with figuring out a different way--some object on the C++ side whose lifecycle matches that of the container behind the C API, either by coincidence or by design.

Hopefully I've done a better job explaining this time.

--
Chris Cleeland