On 2/7/06, Christopher Kohlhoff <chris@kohlhoff.com> wrote: [snip]
Why should it be? A socket has an identity and is not a value-type object. And I don't want the interface to impose the cost of using a shared pointer when it's not required.
That's why it should be able to have both, one that's moveable and another that's reference counted.
In many applications the socket object might be on the stack, or it could be a member of some other class, e.g.:
Moveable would work nicely this way, but hardly well without even moveable-semantics. [snip]
where the outer class is the one that's in a shared_ptr (as it is in my preferred approach). Consider also stream layering, e.g.:
asio::ssl::stream<asio::stream_socket> socket;
In this case a reference counted stream_socket implementation gives no advantage - it's the entire composed stream object that would need to be reference counted. Hence the shared_ptr should be external to the stream, not internal.
asio::ssl::stream should give a reference counted and a moveable interface too, and use the moveable internally. [snip]
Cheers, Chris
-- Felipe Magno de Almeida