C++: Replace raw pointers with shared and weak ptr

Question

I\'m facing a design issue in my program. I have to manage Nodes object which are part of a root ChainDescriptor.

Basically it looks like the following:

Answer 1

The usual implementation would be for each node to have strong reference to its child (i.e. keeps them alive), and each child to have a weak reference back to the parent.

The reason for this is to avoid circular references. If only strong references were used, then you'd have a situation where the parent refcount never drops to zero (because the child has a reference), and the child refcount never drops to zero (because the parent has a reference).

I think your ChainDescriptor class is okay to use strong references here though.