Re: [gtkmm] using RefPtr out of Gtkmm

[Chris Vine <chris cvine freeserve co uk>]

On Tuesday 10 February 2004 14:30, Murray Cumming wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-02-06 at 18:34, Jose Felix Hernandez Barrio wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm developing an application that must use a smart pointer, and i have
> > a few questions:
> >
> > 1- Is there any tutorial for refptr?
> > 2- Can i use refptr out of gtkmm class hierarchy? must i derive my
> > classes from any glib o gtk classes and add any functionality ???
>
> RetPtr is documented in the reference documentation and the book. It is
> not a general purpose smartpointer. But it's not difficult to write a
> general purpose shared reference-counting smartpointer.

However, Glib::RefPtr appears to be a fairly typical intrusive smart pointer.  
According to the gtkmm/glibmm documentation it only requires the referenced 
object to have reference() and dereference() methods (in other words, to 
increment and decrement its own reference count and to delete itself when 
this drops to 0).  If these are home-made objects, this is very easy to do, 
and if you are already using glibmm is probably worth doing as it saves 
having to add another library or dependency.

Of course, if you cannot modify the referenced object to accommodate an 
intrusive smart pointer then you are stuffed, and need to use something like 
boost::shared_ptr (or write your own smart pointer to keep the reference 
count as you say).

Chris.