On Sunday 04 November 2007 00:45:47 Mike Tegtmeyer wrote:
I agree but it quickly becomes a pain because you end up writing a wrapper for every thing of this type to satisfy this 'wart' with shared_ptr:
pthread_create ... opendir fopen open free COM objects
the list goes on.
I'd take that even further, not all such resources are represented as pointer (think filedescriptors or win32 HANDLEs), so shared_ptr doesn't help at all. Further, you usually only need a scope-based lifetime, not true sharing with reference counting, so std::auto_ptr or boost::scoped_ptr should be enough. Lastly, you don't need a smart pointer at all, because the overloads of -> and * are typically never used with those opaque handles. However, sometimes things like returning them from functions is used, but in those cases the behaviour of std::auto_ptr (i.e. ownership transfer) is fully sufficient. I posted a wrapper that gives you just that some time ago here, asking for comments. I didn't get any, probably because it was in the hot phase of the last release. I'll post the whole mail again, the subject is "helper for managing legacy resources". Uli