Learning C++ Functional Programming

Tracking the objects using a weak_ptr pointer

We have discussed the shared_ptr in the preceding section. The pointer is actually a little bit fat pointer. It logically points to two objects, the object being managed and the pointing counter using the use_count() method. Every shared_ptr basically has a strong reference count that prevents the object from being deleted and a weak reference count that does not prevent the object being deleted if the shared_ptr object's use count reaches 0, although we don't even use the weak reference count. For this reason, we can use only one reference count so we can use the weak_ptr pointer. The weak_ptr pointer refers to an object that is managed by shared_ptr. The advantage of weak_ptr is that it can ...