Explicitly deleting a shared_ptr

Question

Simple question here: are you allowed to explicitly delete a boost::shared_ptr yourself? Should you ever?

Clarifying, I don\'t mean delete the pointer held

Answer 1

You cannot force its reference count to zero, no.

Think about what would be required for that to work. You would need to go to each place the shared_ptr is used and clear it.

If you did force the shared pointer to delete and set it to NULL, it would be just like a weak_ptr. However, all those places in the code using that shared_ptr are not ready for that and expect to be holding a valid pointer. They have no reason to check for NULL, and so those bits of code would crash.