Does the number of references change when calling data() of a qsharedpointer

Question

If I write this code:

QSharedPointer<int> ptr(new int());  

The number of references pointing to the integer is 1.
But when I call data() like this:

QSharedPointer<int> ptr(new int());   
int* ptr2 = ptr.data();  

Is the number of references 1 or 2 ?
Thanks for help.

Answer 1

It won't change. QSharedPointer only shares the pointer with QSharedPointer . It won't and can't share with raw pointer.

QSharedPointer will delete the pointer it is holding when it goes out of scope, provided no other QSharedPointer objects are referencing it.

And QSharedPointer::data() does nothing except

Returns the value of the pointer referenced by this object.

Answer 2

Calling data() does not change reference count. In fact, it doesn't really do anything. Its implementation is just this

inline T *data() const { return value; }

This is taken directly from Qt sources .