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Smart pointers typically keep track of the memory they point to, and may also be used to manage other resources, such as network connections and file handles. Smart pointers were first popularized in the programming language C++ during the first half of the 1990s as rebuttal to criticisms of C++'s lack of automatic garbage collection. [1] [2]
In the C++ programming language, a reference is a simple reference datatype that is less powerful but safer than the pointer type inherited from C. The name C++ reference may cause confusion, as in computer science a reference is a general concept datatype, with pointers and C++ references being specific reference datatype implementations.
Objects that are shared but not owned can be accessed via a reference, raw pointer, or iterator (a conceptual generalisation of pointers). However, by the same token, C++ provides native ways for users to opt-into such functionality: C++11 provides reference counted smart pointers, via the std::shared_ptr class, enabling automatic shared memory ...
Since C++11, the C++ standard library also provides smart pointers (unique_ptr, shared_ptr and weak_ptr) which can be used in some situations as a safer alternative to primitive C pointers. C++ also supports another form of reference, quite different from a pointer, called simply a reference or reference type.
A reference is an abstract data type and may be implemented in many ways. Typically, a reference refers to data stored in memory on a given system, and its internal value is the memory address of the data, i.e. a reference is implemented as a pointer. For this reason a reference is often said to "point to" the data.
In C++11, a move constructor of std::vector<T> that takes an rvalue reference to an std::vector<T> can copy the pointer to the internal C-style array out of the rvalue into the new std::vector<T>, then set the pointer inside the rvalue to null. Since the temporary will never again be used, no code will try to access the null pointer, and ...
Reference counting in C++ is usually implemented using "smart pointers" [18] whose constructors, destructors, and assignment operators manage the references. A smart pointer can be passed by reference to a function, which avoids the need to copy-construct a new smart pointer (which would increase the reference count on entry into the function ...
The Boost C++ library provides strong and weak references. It is a mistake to use regular C++ pointers as the weak counterparts of smart pointers because such usage removes the ability to detect when the strong reference count has gone to 0 and the object has been deleted. Worse yet, it does not allow for detection of whether another strong ...