new_blog/projects/cpp-std-shared.md

C++ std::shared_ptr partial implementation

The what

C++ has something called std::shared_ptr as a part of the standard library. I implemented a subset of the functionality present in std::shared_ptr for a class I took in college.

What std::shared_ptr does is that it holds a pointer to something on the heap and a counter to track how many std::shared_ptrs for that pointer exist, when that number hits 0 the pointer is freed. Compared to manually needing to keep track of whether anything is using a pointer it's reasonably nice.

What was learned

I won't go into detail but I did not finish everything needed for this assignment. The simple lesson which I will undoubtedly need to relearn over and over again is that I shouldn't procrastinate, things can be harder/take longer than expected.