On Aug 7, 2004, at 3:14 AM, David B. Held wrote:
troy d.straszheim wrote:
shared_ptr<Widget> p = shared_ptr_cast<Widget>(new Widget); [...]
I kinda like the idea as well. In a sense, you *are* converting the type of the pointer returned by new from a raw pointer to a shared_ptr<>. However, I wonder how much benefit would be derived from this change in practice. This would break all existing shared_ptr<> code, wouldn't it?
As Rob notes, there's no reason the current practice couldn't remain legal: shared_ptr<Widget> p(new Widget); // still OK but not "best practice" but of course that falls short of the mark w.r.t. *forcing* the "announcement" of the conversion from raw to shared_ptr via the shared_ptr_cast<>. I find Rob's observation that the shared_ptr_cast<> supports specialization for other source types (I knew something good and obvious was there, duh) compelling. Would seem reasonable to me to allow both and have the docs reflect that a cast is preferred, but if the consensus is to turn off the constructor-from-raw-pointer, if not now, when? As I'm new to the list, I don't have a good feel for the cost of this in terms of client-code-breakage, nor for how much emphasis is placed on backwards-compatibility in boost releases... (relatively little, since the idea is to hammer out standards-ready designs?) -t