[boost] Re: new approach to smart ptrs -- no new()s is goodnews

From: Greg Colvin (gcolvin_at_[hidden])
Date: 2000-01-28 22:41:34

From: Dave Abrahams <abrahams_at_[hidden]>
> Very exciting!!
> 
> Greg, how does this square with your plans for adding the capability of full
> GC, weak pointers, etc?

I considered this approach for GC, but I was worried that copying
might be more expensive, and that doing the garbage collection
would thrash over more memory than necessary as it traversed the
links.  Instead I chose to keep all the handles in a deque, and
thread a free list through the deque for fast reallocation of
handles.

As people keep thinking up new kinds of smart pointer, and new
ways to implement the ones we have, I am starting to think we
need some sort of smart pointer requirements, which would make it
easier to code generically without caring what kind of pointer
was chosen, and reduce the pressure to parameterize shared_ptr
with different kinds of implementation.