I'm curious a patch to boost::enable_shared_from_this that makes shared_from_this() work inside constructors would be considered? The implementation I've got in mind (haven't actually tried it yet) would work as follows. I'd add two shared_ptrs to enable_shared_from_this, call them "internal_shared" and "external_shared". external_shared would be assigned the external shared_ptr which first takes ownership of *this. internal_shared would be initialized with the "this" pointer, and a custom deleter which would reset external_shared. internal_shared would be reset right after external_shared is initialized (when an external shared_ptr takes ownership of *this). Any calls to shared_from_this() that occur prior to an external shared_ptr taking ownership of *this (such as in the constructor) would get a copy of internal_shared. So the idea is, external_shared would keep the object alive as long as any copies of internal_shared that got made in the constructor are still around. -- Frank