Peter Dimov wrote:
Yes, and I see nothing bad with it. Shared_ptr does precisely the same, and since this cleanup function is intended to do the same as shared_ptr's deleter does, I don't see why would the interface have to differ.
thread_specific_ptr was more or less intended to provide a C++ equivalent to pthread_setspecific, and the POSIX interface associates a single destructor function to a TSD slot. It's technically possible to emulate shared_ptr, but is there a reason for that?
There is no specific reason for that. That feature would just follow from the interface if thread_specific_ptr was consistent with shared_ptr. As for the consistency itself, well, in my opinion this feature can potentially be useful if one would want to allocate memory for TSD in a thread-specific allocator or storage. This may be useful for both performance optimization and memory consumption monitoring and control on per-thread basis. Besides, overall interface consistency is a sign of a good library design.