Re: [boost] Looking for thoughts on a new smart pointer: shared_ptr_nonnull

Subject: Re: [boost] Looking for thoughts on a new smart pointer: shared_ptr_nonnull
From: Mostafa (mostafa_working_away_at_[hidden])
Date: 2013-10-02 18:19:38

On Wed, 02 Oct 2013 12:09:56 -0700, Matt Calabrese <rivorus_at_[hidden]>  
wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 4:18 AM, Luke Bradford  
> <lukebradford01_at_[hidden]>wrote:
>
>> Thanks for the feedback, Matt - some quick thoughts:
>>
[snip]
>> I also think that having a conversion to bool is misleading -
>> in the use cases I've seen, it would lead to a lot of extraneous if(  
>> ptr )
>> statements, then essentially if( true ), which obscure the programmer's
>> intentions and are easy to remove. I found the elimination of the  
>> default
>> constructor and conversion to bool just as useful, if not more useful,  
>> than
>> the runtime checks of the class, because they revealed places where we  
>> were
>> default constructing or checking a shared_ptr that we expected to be  
>> valid
>> at all times.
>>
>
> The point isn't for people to use them in new code written specifically  
> for
> the type, it's both to transition from old code and to work fine with
> generic code. You can also think of it as how boost::variant has an  
> "empty"
> function that just always returns false.

Maybe I'm just being thick, why can't you just cast it/wrap it as a  
shared_ptr obj before passing it to such generic code?