What's the best signature for clone() in C++?

Question

As Scott Myers wrote, you can take advantage of a relaxation in C++\'s type-system to declare clone() to return a pointer to the actual type being declared:

Answer 1

That's one reason to use boost::intrusive_ptr instead of shared_ptr or auto/unique_ptr. The raw pointer contains the reference count and can be used more seamlessly in situations like this.