Hello to all, While developing the Boost Shmem library I needed to be independent of the pointer types (raw or smart), so I started looking for those functions in Boost. As I've seen an overloaded "get_pointer" function returns a raw pointer from a generic pointer, and I've made the same with the relative offset_ptr from Boost Shmem. But to treat all types of pointer generically I needed to obtain from a generic pointer a pointer to other type of the same class. I've solved this defining in my smart pointer an internal type following the STL allocator rebind mechanism: /*!Obtains offset_ptr <OtherType> from offset_ptr*/ template<typename OtherType> struct pointer_to_type { typedef my_smart_ptr<OtherType> type; }; and the structs: template <typename Ptr, typename NewValueType> struct pointer_to_other { typedef typename Ptr::template pointer_to_type<NewValueType>::type type; }; template <typename T, typename NewValueType> struct pointer_to_other<T*, NewValueType> { typedef NewValueType *type; }; so that the user can generically write: typedef pointer_to_other<NewType>(my_smart_ptr)::type new_pointer_t; and obtain a pointer of the same class (smart pointer or raw pointer) to other type. My question is, do you find this mechanism useful to include it in boost in a general way, and if so, is there another way of doing this without modifying existing classes (for example, if I want use these mechanism with shared_ptr)? Regards, /Ion