Reposted from my old blog. Here’s the news from 2009…

I’m currently in the final stages of converting a library from raw pointers to boost::shared_ptr. I’m mainly doing this to ensure the correct pointer/pointee ownership rather than the outright prevention of memory leaks, but the latter is a nice side effect of the former.

One problem I ran into was that the library I’m updating and its clients make rather heavy use of polymorphism. Of course in 99% of the code that was fine as the objects were accessed through pointers to base classes, but the last 1% was causing problems because that part of the code contained lots of dynamic_cast statements. These classes unfortunately need to know the exact type they were dealing with so there was no easy way around the use of these idioms. It probably isn’t news to most of the people reading this blog that dynamic_cast and boost::shared_ptr don’t play that nicely.