Detach a pointer from a shared_ptr?

Question

Possible Duplicate:
How to release pointer from boost::shared_ptr?

A function of my interface returns a pointer to an object. The user is supposed to take ownership of that object. I do not want to return a Boost.shared_ptr, because I do not want to force clients to use boost. Internally however, I would like to store the pointer in a shared_ptr to prevent memory leaks in case of exceptions etc. There seems to be no way to detach a pointer from a shared pointer. Any ideas here?

Answer 1

What you're looking for is a release function; shared_ptr doesn't have a release function. Per the Boost manual:

Q. Why doesn't shared_ptr provide a release() function?

A. shared_ptr cannot give away ownership unless it's unique() because the other copy will still destroy the object.

Consider:

shared_ptr<int> a(new int);
shared_ptr<int> b(a); // a.use_count() == b.use_count() == 2

int * p = a.release();

// Who owns p now? b will still call delete on it in its destructor.

Furthermore, the pointer returned by release() would be difficult to deallocate reliably, as the source shared_ptr could have been created with a custom deleter.

Two options you might consider:

• You could use std::tr1::shared_ptr, which would require your users to use a C++ library implementation supporting TR1 or to use Boost; at least this would give them the option between the two.
• You could implement your own boost::shared_ptr-like shared pointer and use that on your external interfaces.

You might also look at the discussion at this question about using boost::shared_ptr in a library's public interface.