Hands-On Design Patterns with C++

Expressing shared ownership

The last type of ownership we need to cover is shared ownership, where multiple entities own the object equally. First, a word of caution—shared ownership is often misused, or over-used. Consider the preceding example, where a function was passed a shared pointer to an object it did not need to own. It is tempting to let the reference counting deal with the ownership of objects and not worry about deletion. However, this is often a sign of a poor design. In most systems, at some level, there is a clear ownership of resources, and it should be reflected in the chosen design of resource management. The not worry about deletion concern remains valid; explicit deletion of objects should be rare, but automatic deletion ...