Raw Pointer Management in C++

Question

I have a piece of performance critical code. The class and objects are fairly large, hence, it would be stored as pointers in the STL container. Problems arise when the pointers to objects need to be stored in multiple different containers based on some logic. It is very messy in handling the ownership of the object as I couldn't isolate the ownership of the object to a single containers(which I could just delete from the single container). Other than using smart pointer (since it is performance critical and smart pointer might affects the performance), what could I do?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You are asking for impossible - from one point, you are asking for exceptional performance, such that smart pointers you claim cannot provide, and you also happen to ask for safety and tidiness. Well, one comes at the cost of another, actually. You could, of course try to write your own shared pointer, which would be more lightweight than boost's, but still provide the basic functionality. Incidentally, have you actually tried boost::shared_ptr? Did it actually slow down the performance?

Answer 2

Your question is very awkward: you ask for performance with a messy logic ?

shared_ptr have incredible performance, really, and though you can get better it is probably your best choice: it works.

You could look up another Boost smart pointer though: boost::intrusive_ptr .

This is done at the cost of foregoing: weak_ptr and in exchange allows to have a single memory allocation for both the counter and the object. Packing up the two yields a SMALL increase in performance.

If you do not have cyclic reference, try and check it out, it might be what you were looking for.

Answer 3

Intrusive smart pointers are typically more efficient than normal smart pointers, yet easier than dumb pointers. For instance, check out boost::intrusive_ptr<T>

Answer 4

If the objects don't refer to one another, manual reference counting might be worth trying. There would be more cost when adding to or removing from a list, but no overhead to the actual object access. (This can be painful to diagnose when you get it wrong, so I recommend being careful to get it right.)

If there is dead time between operations, consider a sort of garbage collect. Maintain the list of all objects (an intrusive list would probably do). When you have time to spare, cross-reference this against the other lists; any objects that aren't in a list can get deleted. You don't need an extra array to do this (just a global counter and a last-seen counter on each object) so it could be reasonably efficient.

Another option would be to use a smart pointer that provides access to the underlying pointer. If you're trying to avoid the overhead of calling an overloaded operator-> a lot then this might be worth trying. Store the smart pointers in the lists (this does the lifetime management for you) and then when running through the objects you can retrieve the raw pointer for each and operate using that (so you don't incur the overhead of any overloaded operator-> etc.). For example:

std::vector<smart_ptr<T> > objects;

if(!objects.empty()) {
    smart_ptr<T> *objects_raw=&objects[0];
    for(size_t n=objects.size(),i=0;i<n;++i) {
        T *object=objects_raw[i].get_ptr();

        // do stuff
    }
}

This is the sort of approach I prefer personally. Long-term storage gets a smart pointer, short-term storage gets a plain pointer. The object lifetimes are easy to manage, and you don't fall foul of 1,000,000 tiny overheads (more important for keeping the debug build runnable than it is for the release build, but it can easily add to wasted time nonetheless).