Hi! I used the boost shared pointers for quite a while successfully but now ran into a problem I don't have a nice solution yet. I have a class A which has a vector of B classes. I now need to get from the class A to all Bs which is easy (iterating over the vector) and I need to get from any B to A (which I handle with a weak pointer) But now I need to implement a copy method to get a "real" copy of A and not a pointer to the shared instance. How would I do that? The copy also points to copies of the Bees aka. deep copy. My current solution looks like this: class A; class B; typedef boost::shared_ptr< A > A_SP; typedef boost::weak_ptr< A > A_WP; typedef boost::shared_ptr< B > B_SP; class A : public boost::enable_shared_from_this< A > { public: int x; int y; std::vector< B_SP > bees; void addB ( B_SP b ); A_SP clone (); }; class B { public: A_WP weakA; int c; B_SP clone (); }; void A::addB ( B_SP b ) { b->weakA = shared_from_this(); bees.push_back ( b ); } A_SP A::clone () { A_SP newA ( new A ); newA->x = x; newA->y = y; for ( std::vector< B_SP >::const_iterator it = bees.begin (); it != bees.end (); ++it ) { newA->addB ( (*it)->clone () ); } return newA; } B_SP B::clone () { B_SP newB ( new B ); // note I can't initialize the weak_ptr here newB->c = c; return newB; } int main() { A_SP a ( new A ); B_SP b ( new B ); a->addB ( b ); // Now make a deep copy of a A_SP newA = a->clone(); return 0; } Any ideas how this could be done more beautiful? Or more C++ish? Every help is greatly appreciated, since I still need to get accustomed to C++. Thanks a lot, Fabian