Question

I have a list of smart pointers. I want some of these smart pointers to act as regular pointers, meaning they are simply a reference to an instance and are not involved in its deallocation. They might for example point to instances allocated on the stack. The other smart pointers in the list should act as regular boost::shared_ptr.

Here is how the class might look:

template<class T> smart_ptr {
private:
    T *p;
    boost::shared_ptr<T> sp;
public:
    smart_ptr(T *p): p(p), shared(0) { } // p will not be deleted
    smart_ptr(boost::shared_ptr<T> &sp): p(sp.get()), sp(sp) { }
    T *get() const { return p; }
}

If there is a boost class that does this, I would prefer to use it instead of writing a class myself. It appears there are none, or am I mistaken?

Answer 1

One constructor for shared_ptr takes the destructor method, and you can pass in an empty functor.

Using Custom Deallocator in boost::shared_ptr

(You want just an empty function.)