I'm writing a public api for a product which will be bundled as a precompiled dll or binary and one of my goals is binary compatibility (if not across major versions, at least across minor). I'd like to implement the pimpl idiom and reference counting for the handle classes as appropriate, but I'm worried about all the typical stuff (exception safety, memory leaks, etc) and I'd rather not reinvent the wheel. eg. template<typename T> class MyClass { public: T foo(); private: boost::shared_ptr<MyClassImpl<T> > impl; }; Using boost::shared_ptr would be great, but this means clients of my code would have to have the same version of boost installed that we use, and I imagine this could cause conflicts in the event that they happen to use boost (and a different version of it). I'd rather not include more code dependencies than I absolutely have to, especially if they may prove problematic in the future. What do I do? I know I'm not the first in this situation. How often have others opted for this dependency as opposed to furnishing their own alternative that would avoid additional dependencies (at the expense of the benefit of time-tested code)?