Boost C++ Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition

Making a noncopyable but movable class

Now, imagine the following situation: we have a resource that cannot be copied, which should be correctly freed in a destructor, and we want to return it from a function:

descriptor_owner construct_descriptor() {     return descriptor_owner("Construct using this string"); } 

Actually, you can work around such situations using the swap method:

void construct_descriptor1(descriptor_owner& ret) {     descriptor_owner("Construct using this string").swap(ret); } 

However, such a workaround does not allow us to use descriptor_owner in containers. By the way, it looks awful!