axter wrote:
I think the cow_ptr should be used as the default method for creating containers of pointers, and that the current boost pointer containers should be used when memory management is the more important factor for a particular requirement.
Their primary purpose is to facilitate OOP in C++. This domain is sufficiently different from the value-based domain that different programming idioms apply.
I'm not sure about the ptr_set and ptr_map classes, because I haven't seen any example code usage that would have it work with an abstract type.
Listen, when you said you could get it to work with an abstract type, I tried it out. It works fine, but one gets errors if one does not define new_clone() for the abstract type: namespace Foo { struct abtract_base { ... }; inline new_clone( const abstract_base& r ) { return r.clone(); } } My guess is that most of the other compile problems go away when you define this. Did you not read http://www.boost.org/libs/ptr_container/doc/reference.html#the-clonable-conc... ? The default new_clone() won't work when T is abstact: template< class T > inline T* new_clone( const T& t ) { return new T( t ); } -Thorsten