Question

Is it ok to do the following? Obviously the caller is not prevented from deleting the naked pointer. Should I use shared_ptr and return a shared_ptr? It seems too heavy for this.

class A
{
   B* GetB() { return pointer.get(); }
private:
   unique_ptr<B> pointer;
};

Answer 1

I think that it should work fine as it is, making it clear in the documentation that such pointer is not intended to be deleted.

Still, I would probably return a reference: in that case it’s implicit that the caller mustn’t delete anything.

class A
{
   B & GetB() { return *(pointer.get()); }
private:
   unique_ptr<B> pointer;
};

Edit it turns out that the pointer can be NULL; in such case, the reference must be avoided.

You could create some kind of smart-dumb do_not_delete_me_ptr class that just encapsulates the pointer and make extra clear that you must not delete it, but I think this too is overkill. 😉