This post is an overview of the smart pointers available in Boost, TR1, and C++x0. It also touches on the availability and portability of the last two options when it comes to various C++ compilers.

General-purpose smart pointers can be divided into two categories: shared pointers and unique pointers. With shared pointers there could be multiple instances of the smart pointer pointing to the same object. Shared pointers normally use some form of reference counting to manage the lifetime of the object they point to. Unique pointers have the restriction of only one instance of the smart pointer managing the object.

Shared pointer implementations are normally differentiated by the location of the reference counter. The two most commonly used approaches are having the counter embedded into the object itself (intrusive reference counter) and allocating the counter separately, normally on the heap. Another, less frequently used approach, is to allocate the counter in the same block of memory as the object itself.

Unique pointer implementations are normally differentiated by the way they handle pointer copying and copy assignment. C++-98 std::auto_ptr is a unique pointer that transfers the ownership of the object from the source pointer to the newly created pointer in case of the copy construction or to the left hand side in case of the copy assignment.

Boost

Boost includes an assortment of smart pointers which are grouped into the header-only smart_ptr sub-library. The current release contains the following variants:

scoped_ptr <boost/scoped_ptr.hpp> intrusive_ptr <boost/intrusive_ptr.hpp> shared_ptr <boost/shared_ptr.hpp> weak_ptr <boost/weak_ptr.hpp>

Boost scoped_ptr is a unique pointer implementation that does not support copying or copy assignment. Nor does it support returning a scoped_ptr instance from a function. intrusive_ptr provides support for objects with an embedded reference counter. This pointer calls the intrusive_ptr_add_ref(T*) and intrusive_ptr_release(T*) functions to manage the object’s lifetime. You are expected to provide suitable implementations of these functions for your object types.

Boost shared_ptr is a shared pointer implementation that uses a separate reference counter allocated on the heap. weak_ptr is a companion pointer which points to the object owned by shared_ptr without having an increment in the reference counter. It is primarily useful to resolve cycles in an object ownership graph that would otherwise prevent the objects in the graph from ever being deleted.

One common criticism of implementations with separate reference counters such as Boost shared_ptr is the performance and memory usage penalty incurred by the separate allocation of the reference counter. To mitigate this issue Boost shared_ptr provides two helper functions, make_shared() and allocate_shared() , that allow you to allocate the reference counter and the object itself as a single memory block. There are, however, other penalties and limitations associated with this approach.

Firstly, if you have a weak_ptr instance pointing to an object that has already been deleted (that is, there are no more shared_ptr instances pointing to this object), then that weak_ptr will prevent the memory that was used for the object from being freed. This is because the reference counter used by shared_ptr and weak_ptr is only freed when there are no more instances of either pointer type. And since the counter and the object are allocated as a single block of memory, they can only be freed together.

The other drawback of the make_shared() implementation is the increase in the object code size. Due to the way this optimization is implemented, an additional virtual table as well as a set of virtual functions will be instantiated for each object type that you use with make_shared() .

Finally, make_shared() will need access to the object’s constructor. This, for example, breaks the canonical object factory implementation where the object’s constructor is made private to prevent direct construction and the factory is made a friend of the object’s class. Making make_shared() a friend is not easy either since it is actually a set of overloaded function templates.

To make use of Boost smart pointers in your application, you will need to add an external dependency on Boost. Since the smart_ptr library is header-only, you or users of your application won’t need to build anything in Boost. Boost is also fairly portable and can be used with most modern C++ compilers. The smart_ptr library in particular has been around for a while so even if all of Boost cannot be built with your compiler of choice, chances are you will be able to use the smart pointers.

TR1

Technical Report on C++ Library Extensions, commonly referred to as TR1, adds the shared_ptr smart pointer implementation to the std::tr1 namespace. The TR1 shared_ptr has the same interface as Boost shared_ptr . The only part that is not available in TR1 are the make_shared() and allocate_shared() functions discussed above.

If TR1 shared_ptr is the same as (or, more precisely, slightly “less” than) Boost shared_ptr , you may be wondering why would anyone use the TR1 version. You may prefer to use TR1 shared_ptr because its implementation comes with the C++ compiler and your application does not need to have any extra dependencies. However, if you are already using Boost, then it doesn’t make much sense to use shared_ptr from TR1. Another potential advantage of the TR1 version are the compiler and platform-specific optimizations that can be implemented by the compiler vendors. The thread safety of the reference counter operations is one area where such optimizations can make a big difference. However, in practice and at this time, most implementations of the TR1 shared_ptr are copies of the code from Boost.

The following table summarizes the support for TR1 shared_ptr in widely-used C++ compilers:

GNU g++ since 4.0.0 MS Visual Studio (VC++) since 2008 (9.0) with Feature Pack or SP1 Sun Studio (Sun CC) not available in the latest release (12 Update 1) IBM XL C++ since 9.0 HP aCC not available in the latest release (A.06.25) Intel C++ uses TR1 headers from GNU g++ or VC++

The TR1 specification requires that if new declarations are added to existing headers (and shared_ptr is added to <memory> ), such declarations should not be visible to the application code by default. Instead, the application developer must take some special action to enable TR1 declarations. With current implementations you are either required to define a special macro or include the TR1 versions of the headers from a different directory. This can be a major hurdle in writing portable applications that use TR1.

From the above list, GNU g++ uses the separate header approach and requires that you include headers with the tr1/ prefix in order to get the TR1 declarations. Visual Studio disregards the TR1 specifications and enables TR1 by default for all applications. IBM XL C++ requires you to define the __IBMCPP_TR1__ macro. And Intel C++, since it uses the C++ standard library from GNU g++ on Linux/Mac OS X and from Visual Studio on Windows, will behave like one of the two compilers, depending on the platform. The following code fragment shows how we can include the TR1-enabled <memory> header in a portable manner:

#include <cstddef> // for __GLIBCXX__ #ifdef __GLIBCXX__ # include <tr1/memory> #else # ifdef __IBMCPP__ # define __IBMCPP_TR1__ # endif # include <memory> #endif

Boost also provides an implementation of TR1 (since version 1.34.0) which is just a thin wrapper around other boost libraries. So if the compiler version that you are using does not yet support TR1, you can fall back on the TR1 implementation from Boost. Note, however, that there are some compiler-specific issues that you may have to resolve if you want to include the TR1 headers using their standard names, for example <memory> . On the other hand, using Boost-specific headers, for example <boost/tr1/memory.hpp> , should work consistently across different compilers. See the Boost TR1 library documentation for details. The following code shows how to include the TR1-enabled <memory> header if the compiler provides one and how to fall back on the boost implementation otherwise:

#include <cstddef> // __GLIBCXX__, _HAS_TR1 // GNU C++ or Intel C++ using libstd++. // #if defined (__GNUC__) && __GNUC__ >= 4 && defined (__GLIBCXX__) # include <tr1/memory> // // IBM XL C++. // #elif defined (__xlC__) && __xlC__ >= 0×0900 # define __IBMCPP_TR1__ # include <memory> // // VC++ or Intel C++ using VC++ standard library. // #elif defined (_MSC_VER) && (_MSC_VER == 1500 && defined (_HAS_TR1) || _MSC_VER > 1500) # include <memory> // // Boost fall-back. // #else # include <boost/tr1/memory.hpp> #endif

C++-0x

C++-0x moves the std::tr1::shared_ptr smart pointer to the std namespace and adds support for make_shared() and allocate_shared() .

C++-0x also deprecates auto_ptr and adds a new unique pointer implementation called unique_ptr . The new implementation disables the copy constructor and copy assignment operator and instead provides the “move” constructor and assignment operator that use rvalue-references as their arguments. This still allows you to return a unique_ptr instance from a function with the ownership of the pointed-to object being automatically transferred from the function body to the caller. However, if you want to transfer the ownership from one instance of unique_ptr to another, you will have to do it explicitly with the std::move() call, for example:

struct s {}; std::unique_ptr<s> a (new s); std::unique_ptr<s> b (std::move (a)); a = std::move (b);

At this point only a few C++ compilers support C++-0x and this support is incomplete and experimental. Currently only GCC g++ (4.3 or later), VC++ (10.0) and Intel C++ (11.0) provide enough C++-0x language support to be able to implement shared_ptr and unique_ptr as specified in the draft of the standard.

So which smart pointer implementation should you use in your application? If you have the luxury of using C++-0x, then the choice is pretty straightforward: use std::shared_ptr for shared pointers and std::unique_ptr for unique pointers. The rvalue-aware implementations of these pointers are too good to ignore. For the rest of us who cannot yet use C++-0x, the unique pointer is the old faithful std::auto_ptr and the choice for a shared pointer is between using the compiler-provided one from TR1 or the Boost implementation. If your application is already using Boost, then the choice seems pretty straightforward as well: use Boost and forget about different compiler versions, etc. On the other hand, if your goal is to minimize the external library dependencies, it may be worthwhile to try to use the native TR1 implementation on modern (and thus more popular) C++ compilers and fall back on Boost when TR1 is not available.

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