Re: Containers of iterators vs. containers of references

From:
James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Fri, 25 Jan 2008 03:07:20 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID:
<98553435-c43a-42f7-a1e7-ebf7546da992@k39g2000hsf.googlegroups.com>
On Jan 25, 12:44 am, clark.cole...@att.net wrote:

You can't have a container of references; references aren't
objects. I would use a container of pointers, however.


Any recommendations for type of pointer?


A pointer to whatever type you wanted the reference to.

I started playing with shared_ptr but then I discovered that
Visual Studio does not yet support C++ TR1. I need the code to
run on both x86/Linux under g++ and Visual Studio.


I wouldn't bother with shared_ptr except in some special cases.
I find it fairly rare that a container should control the
lifetime of an object that isn't copiable (and if the object is
copiable, of course, the vector will contain objects, and not
pointers or references)---most of the time, objects which aren't
copiable are entity objects which control their own lifetime.
(One exception might be a container of polymorphic agents. In
such cases, I'll usually use an invasive reference counter in
the base class.)

If you do want shared_ptr, of course, you can get it from boost.
I'm pretty sure that recent versions of both g++ and VC++ can
handle Boost.

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