Question

I am so frustrated right now after several hours trying to find where shared_ptr is located. None of the examples I see show complete code to include the headers for shared_ptr (and working). Simply stating std, tr1 and <memory> is not helping at all! I have downloaded boosts and all but still it doesn’t show up! Can someone help me by telling exactly where to find it?

Thanks for letting me vent my frustrations!

EDIT:
I see my title has been changed. Sorry about that.
So… it was also because it was not clear to me that shared_ptr is “C++ version dependant” –> that’s why I did not state my environment –> therefore probably why it was so difficult for me to find it.

I am working on MSVS2008.

EDIT 2:
I don’t know why, but I was including [memory] and [boost/tr1/memory.hpp] and [boost/tr1/tr1/memory] while looking everywhere for the shared_ptr.. of course, i couldn’t.

Thanks for all the responses.

Answer 1

There are at least three places where you may find shared_ptr:

1. If your C++ implementation supports C++11 (or at least the C++11 shared_ptr), then std::shared_ptr will be defined in <memory>.

2. If your C++ implementation supports the C++ TR1 library extensions, then std::tr1::shared_ptr will likely be in <memory> (Microsoft Visual C++) or <tr1/memory> (g++’s libstdc++). Boost also provides a TR1 implementation that you can use.

3. Otherwise, you can obtain the Boost libraries and use boost::shared_ptr, which can be found in <boost/shared_ptr.hpp>.