Question

For a piece of multiplatform c++ code I am writing, I need a shared pointer. Currently the project does not use boost, and pulling it in would be extremely difficult or impossible from an administrative view. However, I can use select C++11 features, including shared pointers.

There is a problem with the standard shared pointers, they guarantee thread safety. That means that on some platforms/compilers, like GCC ( http://tinyurl.com/GCCSharedPtrLockPolicy ) atomics and mutexes will be needlessly used, but at least I can check and work around issues incurred by this. Then for other platforms ( http://tinyurl.com/msvscSharedPtr ) there does not even appear to be a way to check, what thread safety mechanisms are used. The original boost pointer provides only the most basic of thread safety guarantees ( http://tinyurl.com/SharedPtrThreadSafety ).

My core issue here is that on some platforms Atomics can cause costly synchronizations between CPU caches and unneeded Mutexes can cause calls to the OS that that may delay for not entirely related reasons. This code will be multi-threaded, but we have other synchronization methods for moving data between threads. A thread-safe shared pointer is simply not needed or wanted.

Normally, I would prefer to benchmark and make my decision, but because of the platforms this will run on, and be ported too, I cannot practically do so. I would need to test on some of the less popular platforms, where less optimized compilers tend to exist, but I do not have that ability currently.

I will try to make a push to get Boost pointers, but that is unlikely, what are my other options for when that fails? In the mean time I will research trying to get just the Shared_ptr out of boost, but I do not think that will be easy.

I could roll my own. This seems like a terrible idea, why would I have to re-invent something this basic.

If there is a library with that is simple and has liberal enough licensing, then I could simply copy their shared_ptr code and simplify rolling my own.

Edit: Pulling in anything from boost other than header only libraries has been struck out. I will be researching Loki as one of the answerers suggested. If that fails and no answers materialize here, I will roll my own 🙁 .

Answer 1

It is quite possible to write/adapt your own smart pointer class for use in legacy projects that the newer libraries do not support. I have written my own for just such a reason and it works well with MSVC++ 4.2 and onwards.

See ootips.org/yonat/4dev/smart-pointers.html which is what I based mine on. Definitely a possibility if you want a small solution. Just the header and .cpp file required.

The key point to watch out for is the lack of the explicit keyword in older compilers. Another is that you may want to allow implicit conversion to the raw pointer to allow your APIs to remain less affected (we did this) and in that case you should also take care to prevent conversion to other types of pointers as well.