Re: [boost] [afio] Formal review of Boost.AFIO

Subject: Re: [boost] [afio] Formal review of Boost.AFIO
From: Agustín K-ballo Bergé (kaballo86_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-08-31 12:06:14

On 8/31/2015 12:50 PM, Hartmut Kaiser wrote:
>> I find it personally unfortunate that C++ decided to call it
>> shared_ptr because of the word "shared" in the name, because it
>> really isn't what its name says.
>
> I believe that a lot of thought went into this decision. And it's called
> shared_ptr exactly because of that it represents shared ownership. I think
> you're again confused about what's the rationale of the design and what's
> the consequence of it. Shared ownership is the rationale, being an 'atomic
> safe reference counting implementation which provides no guarantees to its
> pointee' is a consequence.

Let me add that an "atomic safe reference counting implementation" is 
just one of the possible implementations. Although I am not aware of any 
concrete implementation doing things differently, there are alternative 
possible implementations like chaining, and it is the reason for having 
both `use_count` and `unique`.

Regards,
-- 
Agustín K-ballo Bergé.-
http://talesofcpp.fusionfenix.com