best practice when returning smart pointers

Question

What is the best practice when returning a smart pointer, for example a boost::shared_ptr? Should I by standard return the smart pointer, or the underlying raw pointer? I co

Answer 1

In my opinion, in C++, you should always have to justify the use of an unguarded pointer.

There could be many valid reasons: a need for very high performance, for very low memory usage, for dealing with legacy libraries, because of some issue with the underlying data structure the pointer is storing. But [dynamically allocated] pointers are somewhat 'evil', in that you have to deallocate the memory at every possible execution path and you will almost certainly forget one.