C++ Patterns - Reference Accounting.

Abstract

I felt free and therefore I was free. Jack Kerouac Object-oriented systems represent their information and express their behavior through networks of objects. Some objects, such as value-based objects, are strictly owned, managed, and contained within the scope of functions or other objects. Other kinds of objects are more loosely associated, and do not necessarily participate in simple, hierarchical relationships with their dependents. The indirection often leads to sharing, which raises questions of constraint management. What if there is an upper limit to the number of dependents an object should have? How can the end of a shared object's life be constrained to coincide with the end of its last dependent? In C++, such issues are normally presented in terms of memory management, and the solution in terms of reference counting — normally a single reference-counting scheme, dependent on the programmer's preference or previous exposure. In truth, there is both more to reference counting than memory management, more to memory management than reference counting, and more to the implementation of any reference accounting scheme than personal preference. Different

Cite this paper

@article{henney2001patterns,
  title = {{C++ Patterns - Reference Accounting.}},
  author = {Henney, Kevlin},
  pages = {181--226},
  year = {2001}
}

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