A minimal shared/unique_ptr implementation.
Sometimes you are stuck on an old toolchain without C++11, but you still want a reference-counted smart pointer. For that reason, we were using Boost shared_ptr.
But for a specific embedded project, we hit a problem trying to compile and link our code with boost smart pointer library: the binary was too big for the target!
So I wrote shared_ptr, a minimal header-only shared_ptr (a subset of the C++11 std::shared_ptr / boost::shared_ptr) for C++98/03.
It is small and simple on purpose: header-only, STL-only dependencies, about 92 bytes per template instantiation. It also ships a fake unique_ptr as a placeholder on compilers that lack the real one (it does not conform to the standard, it is just there so the same code compiles).
What it deliberately does not do:
- no
weak_ptr - no array support (it won’t call
delete[]) - not thread-safe (monothreaded by design)
- it needs virtual destructors to delete a derived object through a base pointer
It comes with documentation and unit tests, and is tested with GCC, Clang and Visual Studio on Linux and Windows. It’s published under the MIT license, like everything I do.
Obviously, if you are on a modern compiler, just use std::shared_ptr. This is only for when you can’t.