In-Reply-To: <422D79A6.4050502@aaronwl.com> aaronrabiddog51@aaronwl.com (Aaron W. LaFramboise) wrote (abridged):

...

I have always thought that concrete implementations of portable libraries should supply users a way to get at the OS-specific data so they can use platform-specific facilities on them if neccessary. [...] It seems to me that, by doing this, we are throwing away so many correctness guarantees. To me, this seems sort of like taking shared_ptr, and making it implicitly convertable to a pointer.

Surely it's more like taking shared_ptr and giving it an explicit get() function? You can break invariants by doing stuff like: delete p.get(); but people are unlikely to do that by accident. Access to the underlying raw pointer is essential for inter-operating with software which isn't smart-pointer aware. So it is with OS handles. -- Dave Harris, Nottingham, UK