Dear All, I have just had a quick look at how easily shared_ptr could be adapted to use Helge's proposed Boost.Atomic. To me it looks very simple, but maybe someone who knows more about all this could have a look? I took the non-threaded implementation in sp_counted_base_nt.hpp as a starting point, and simply changed the two counts from long to boost::atomic<long> : boost::atomic<long> use_count_; // #shared boost::atomic<long> weak_count_; // #weak + (#shared != 0) Then, the majority of the methods don't need to change since the atomic template provides atomic versions of e.g. operator++. The one that does need more work is add_ref_lock, which I've implemented as follows: bool add_ref_lock() // true on success { while (1) { long c = use_count_; if (c == 0) return false; if (use_count_.compare_exchange_weak(c,c+1)) return true; } } There is also the question of memory barriers. I understand that things like operator++ provide the most pessimistic memory barriers, so ideally these should be replaced with calls that use the right barriers. Does anyone have any thoughts about how this would compare with the current custom assembler implementations? Cheers, Phil.