internal_ptr | CppCon 2016 keynote , Herb Sutter | Dataset library

internal_ptr is a C++ library typically used in Artificial Intelligence, Dataset applications. internal_ptr has no bugs, it has no vulnerabilities and it has low support. You can download it from GitHub.

In his CppCon 2016 keynote, Herb Sutter described the ideal of code being "leak free by construction", and then went on to detail the uses of std::unique_ptr and std::shared_ptr to ensure this. One of the key shortcomings of the standard smart pointers is that they don't work for data structures with cycles: if A holds a std::shared_ptr to B and B holds a std::shared_ptr to A then they will never be freed, even if there are no other references to A or B. Herb proposed his gcpp library as an experimental solution to this problem. By allocating your objects from the deferred_heap, and using deferred_ptr to point to them, then you are guaranteed that they will be properly destroyed by calling their destructors, even if that destruction is "deferred" until later. This library is an alternative solution to the same problem. Rather than deferring collection of unreachable objects, collection is done immediately, just as with std::shared_ptr. The key difference here is that if the only outstanding references to objects are those within a cycle then the whole set of objects is destroyed, rather than the internal references keeping the whole data structure alive.