I have a smart pointer class and I want to overload operator->; it’s provided for convenience so I can access the members of the class contained inside the smart pointer directly.
I was looking at the way Boost implements this operator in its shared_ptr template. I noticed they added an assert checking if the pointer is indeed non-null before returning it. Currently, my operator returns the pointer without checking if it’s null (essentially, a null pointer is undefined behavior in my current implementation). Should I add this assert as well?
(Also, how is this operator called? I couldn’t find this on the web.)
It’s up to you. You could simply document that using it with a null pointer is undefined and do nothing, you could assert, you could throw an exception. There isn’t a right answer. Personally, I would probably throw an exception.