[boost] RE: whatever ptr

From: Rozental, Gennadiy (Gennadiy_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-08-29 16:26:42

Hi,
  I would not want to enter this discussion, but I think that your monologue
need some kind of response.
You see IMO Boost is all about *reusable* components/solutions. The word
reusable here IMO mean that at least 80 percent of users in the target
domain would want to use it.  On the other hand *even* if your are able
provide implementation for you set of requirements, *even* if it will be
portable, *even* if it will be reasonably convenient to use I still fail to
see why the problem your are trying to solve is important and widely
encountered. In other words your set of requirement is IMO very rare. And as
with any rare case it may need some custom solution that would not be
targeted to be reusable.
  Also I wanted to remark that your set of requirements is a bit internally
controversial. On one side one side you are extremely concerned about space
and performance. On the other you want to use smart pointer idiom that
usually bring some overhead in a size and/or performance. Maybe you just
better of with plain pointer? Or scoped_ptr_array that was discussed some
time ago? Or application level solution?. And even none of this is good for
you I again want to repeat: it pretty rare case. And I don't think that it
worth to present any custom solution for some rare case as a reusable
component. The boost::shared_ptr is as it is right now because it is good
enough for a lot of people. IMO boost community may decide that it does not
cover enough cases for resource/memory management, so an alternative (IMO
policy-based) solution could be considered. But it should be at least as
usable and flexible as current one.

Gennadiy.