Simple Smart Pointers

This is going to be the first of many posts abandoning C and heading into C++. I stuck around in C for as long as could, but now heading into my Sophomore year it's time to make the switch.

There are many different implementations and goals of what a smart pointer can be or attempt to achieve. As far as I can see, the term "smart pointer" is a pretty general term that means some sort of extra functionality wrapped around normal pointers. However the smart pointer should be able to behave just like a normal pointer, so overloading of the * and -> operators will be done.

In previous game projects (the ones I written in C in my portfolio) had an issue where when a bit of data was deleted or modified, all other code required to be made aware of such act. This required extra work by the programmer to ensure that no pointers within the program could be accessed if the data they pointed to was modified in an undesirable way (perhaps deleted or converted to another type, or moved). The smart pointer implementation will solve this problem by making it seem like all smart pointers to a single location update each other automatically. Additionally, I wanted to add a little more functionality for ease of use and convenience, of which I'll talk about later in the article.

Here's an example of a problem situation that can arise from misusing ordinary pointers:

SomeFunction
{
  ObjectAddress = newly allocated object
}

Some Other Function
{
  Delete data at ObjectAdress
}

Last Function
{
  ObjectAddress.GetName( ) // Is object deleted yet?
}

I decided to make my smart pointers handle based. A handle system is where some sort of identifier (ID) is mapped to a value by mapping functionality, i.e. std::map. This is extremely useful, as one can now place a layer of indirection between an identifier and its associated value. The reason this is useful goes into many different scenarios, but pertaining to smart pointers we can have a single point of access to the address a smart pointer holds.

template <typename TYPE>
class SmartPtr
{
public:
  SmartPtr( handle val = NULL ): ID( val ) {};
  ~SmartPtr( );

  TYPE *GetPtr( void ) const;
  handle GetID( void ) const { return ID; }
  TYPE *operator->( void );
  TYPE operator*( void );

private:
  handle ID;
  static HandleMap<TYPE> handleMap;
};

Here are the barebones for our smart pointer. The SmartPtr holds an ID, where handle is a typedef'd integer. GetPtr( ) indexes the handleMap (handleMap should be a class to wrap around std::map, to provide inserting and erasing methods) with the SmartPtr's ID to retrieve the pointer value the ID maps to. The SmartPtr itself is templated for a specific type of pointer, this way each different type of data to be pointed to has a different statically defined handleMap. This is a benefit to the amount of unique handles your game can generate. The SmartPtr can be constructed with a handle value, and has a gettor for the handle ID itself.

Now whenever the pointer mapped by a specific ID is modified within the handleMap, all subsequent requests to that value will be updated throughout all other SmartPtr instances with the same ID. This is because the only point of access to the pointer value is through the map itself, meaning there's actually only one pointer mapped by an ID at any given time, although there can be many SmartPtrs with the ID mapping to that single value.

However you may be wondering about how to generate the handle ID itself, as each one needs to be unique. It's very simple: start your first handle at the integer value of 1, and then for every subsequent ID mapped to a new value, add one to the previously used ID. This will give you millions of unique IDs, which is well than more enough for basically any game ever, especially in this case as each type has its own handleMap altogether. The ID value of 0 can be reserved for a NULL pointer to allow to check at any given time if a SmartPtr's handle is valid.

As for the implementation of -> and *, you should use your utility GetPtr( ) function for them. -> will simply require a returning of GetPtr( ), and * will dereference the value returned by GetPtr( ), or return NULL if the value from GetPtr( ) is NULL. In this way your SmartPtr class will behave exactly like an ordinary pointer.

Additionally operator overloads for comparisons, or even pointer arithmetic, can be implemented as well. I implemented equality comparisons.

Lastly, I needed a way to handle inserting a pointer into the handleMap, and consequently erasing it from the map as well. I decided to make the SmartPtr handle this automatically with its constructor and destructor. Currently the example SmartPtr interface I've shown above supports constructing a SmartPtr from an already-generated handle, assuming the handle generation is external the SmartPtr itself. However overloading the constructor to receive a TYPE pointer allows for insertion of this TYPE * into the handleMap automatically. Here's an example:

template <typename TYPE>
SmartPtr<TYPE>::SmartPtr( TYPE *ptr )
{
  ID = handleMap.InsertPtr( ptr );
  clearOnDestruct = true;
}

The constructor inserts the ptr of TYPE into the handleMap by calling a method called InsertPtr( ). The return value is used to initialize the SmartPtr's ID data member. A bool called clearOnDestruct is required to be set, and this will be talked about later.

The InsertPtr( ) is a custom-defined method for your handleMap class. It should just insert a new pointer with a newly generated ID. On destruction of the SmartPtr, if the bool clearOnDestruct is set, the pointer can erase the slot in the handleMap for that ID. This way SmartPtr can contain a pointer for you, perhaps within a linked list or some other data structure.

Lastly, a method called DeletePtr( ) should be implemented to allow delete to be called on the data the SmartPtr contains. This SmartPtr implementation isn't supposed to act as any sort of garbage collection: no reference counting is done. Heap memory contained by a SmartPtr must be explicitly deleted with DeletePtr( ) by design. This way SmartPtr's can easily contain heap allocated memory as well. Here's a diagram showing the flow of a SmartPtr:

Flow of a smart pointer. Can either reference an ID (left), or contain an inserted pointer (right).

Like I said, there are many different ways to implement smart pointers, and many different things they can achieve. However the details here are just what I decided to use to solve specific problems for projects I work on.

Additional reading:

• C++ for Game Programmers - Noel Llopis: Chapter 12
• Modern C++ Design - Andrei Alexandrescu: Chapter 7