Re: [boost] Weak pointer to object not managed by a shared_ptr

Mateusz Loskot wrote:

Hi,

One of the smart pointer techniques [1] explains use of weak_ptr pointer to object not managed by a shared_ptr.

[1] http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_40_0/libs/smart_ptr/sp_techniques.html

I'm wondering what would be practical use case of that? Is it a part of any of known idioms or patterns?

I know, it's not a design guideline to follow but I used the technique to implement pointers that may be checked for being dangling. I needed this to quick fix a problem in a quite complicated code that sometimes crashed due to raw dangling pointers.