Passing const shared_ptr& versus just shared_ptr as parameter

Question

I\'ve been reading quite a number of discussions about performance issues when smart pointers are involved in an application. One of the frequent recommendations is to pass a sm

Answer 1

If no modification of ownership is involved in your method, there's no benefit for your method to take a shared_ptr by copy or by const reference, it pollutes the API and potentially incur overhead (if passing by copy)

The clean way is to pass the underlying type by const ref or ref depending of your use case

void doSomething(const T& o) {}

auto s = std::make_shared(...);
// ...
doSomething(*s);

The underlying pointer can't be released during the method call