Phil, thank you for your encouragement and Peter, thank you for the pointers. Much and truly appreciated. I'll definitely have a look at both Alan's and Peter's implementations if I can make use of those. It's Saturday -- my family-duties day -- and I am just running out the door. After a rrrreally quick look the grip_ptr seems to provide a deep-copy semantics without exposing private implementation. It that is the case, then Alan and Peter (who implemented a similar thing) are definitely smarter than I am as I was not able to figure out how to achieve that (without exposing implementation details). Then I'll steal :-) their idea (with proper acknowledments :-)). That will have to be done in addition to my currently proposed shared_ptr-based implementation as, for example, my current usage pattern is such that I use one data repository/implementation and share/pass many smart-pointer type instances pointing to that sole implementation. Will let you know how it all fired soon. Best, Vladimir. "Phil Endecott" <spam_from_boost_dev@chezphil.org> wrote in message news:1192106650916@dmwebmail.japan.chezphil.org...
Peter Dimov wrote:
Phil Endecott:
Vladimir Batov wrote:
Given I've been using this Pimpl idiom quite extensively lately I've noticed writing the same scaffolding over and over again.
Maybe we need something with a mixture of features from scoped_ptr and shared_ptr. scoped_ptr does everything that I need for a pimpl, except that it can't delete the incomplete implementation type. shared_ptr can delete the incomplete implementation, but it has the unneeded overhead of reference counting and thread safety issues. So, can the incomplete deletion feature of shared_ptr be extracted and added to scoped_ptr? I have just had a quick look at the shared_ptr implementation to see how deletion works, but it's too clever for me to understand....
Alan Griffiths has written a similar smart pointer, arg::grin_ptr:
Thanks Peter, that's exactly what's needed. And very well described by Alan on that page.
It seems that the trick needed to allow incomplete types to be deleted is the same one that allows a shared_ptr to be given a custom deleter, e.g. so that I can free() things that have been malloc()ed by C code. A smart pointer with these features would be great for Boost.
Vladimir, would you like to revise your pimpl template to use this?
Regards, Phil.