[vtk-developers] RFC: vtkScopedPointer - a new hope?

[Marcus D. Hanwell]

On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 3:41 PM, tom fogal <tfogal at sci.utah.edu> wrote:
> "Marcus D. Hanwell" <marcus.hanwell at kitware.com> writes:
>> Some of you may remember my dreams of a concise way of initializing
>> VTK objects, that would go out of scope and be destroyed at the
>> appropriate time. Inspired by the Qt scoped pointer, [. . .]
>>
>> http://review.source.kitware.com/759
>
> scoped (and other) smart pointers were introduced with tr1, back in
> 2003 IIRC.  Further boost has had this for quite some time:
>
>  http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_45_0/libs/smart_ptr/scoped_ptr.htm?sess=94fbb4fa5cfd2b2071c3be193acb355d
>
> I realize that vtk is a bit stuck because it has already shipped some
> smart pointers, and thus probably must continue to do so for some time
> due to backward compat requirements, but I'd discourage *extending*
> the trend.  This is a painful interop problem, especially with larger
> software systems -- there's probably some C++ platitude that states,
> "Every library eventually evolves a smart pointer implementation."
>
> Or there is now, at least.
>
Would any of these scoped pointers actually work with VTK derived
objects? We have private constructors, need to call the static New
method, and the Delete method on destruction. I also don't see VTK
depending on TR1 features, or Boost for quite some time. The class is
quite minimal, and I think it would complement the other two pointer
classes that help to manage VTK derived objects.

Marcus