On Thu, Dec 25, 2008 at 3:06 AM, J.D. Herron <jotadehace@gmail.com> wrote:
My reply was poorly worded. Of course the compiler may choose to generate function calls for an instantiated type and could do so for both the executable and dynamically loaded dll in my simple example. Fine. My point is that even if that were the case it doesn't hurt my simple smart pointer alternative because the function pointers that might exist in the factory are not carried over into the executable and therefore would pose no problem
In general, the caller needs to get the function pointers, or vtables, or boost::function objects, or whatever else I might have stuffed in a custom deleter, not to mention ("a pointer to") the destructor of the pointee. Thus, the DLL must remain loaded. (Note that even if the factory doesn't return a shared_ptr with custom deleter, the fact that it returns a shared_ptr means that it reserves the right to do so occasionally or in a future implementation.) Emil Dotchevski Reverge Studios, Inc. http://www.revergestudios.com/reblog/index.php?n=ReCode