Andrey Semashev wrote:
Mateusz Loskot wrote:
Hi,
One of the smart pointer techniques [1] explains use of weak_ptr pointer to object not managed by a shared_ptr.
[1] http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_40_0/libs/smart_ptr/sp_techniques.html
I'm wondering what would be practical use case of that? Is it a part of any of known idioms or patterns?
I know, it's not a design guideline to follow but I used the technique to implement pointers that may be checked for being dangling. I needed this to quick fix a problem in a quite complicated code that sometimes crashed due to raw dangling pointers.
The detection of dangling pointers is a good example of practical use case of this guideline. It looks like it relates to the case in serialization library pointed by Robert Ramey. I see some light :-) Best regards, -- Mateusz Loskot, http://mateusz.loskot.net Charter Member of OSGeo, http://osgeo.org