Bartlett, Roscoe A wrote:
Hello Boost developers,
I am interested in finding one or more individuals who are knowledgeable about memory management in C++ (and especially of the reference-counting approach taken by boost::shared_ptr and boost::weak_ptr) to review an idea for a comprehensive approach to safer memory management in C++ that encapsulates all raw C++ pointers in high-level code.
Never use owning naked pointers and only use RAII (as is required for exception-safe programming anyway) with exclusive ownership and no aliasing, and you have no problems. Usage of shared_ptr should be an exception, not a widely deployed solution to memory management issues. Shared ownership is hard to reason about, and even if you use a similar cycle-aware solution, cycles remain a real problem (they prevent deterministic ordered destruction of objects, meaning they're only applicable to certain classes of objects).