Smart pointers

Smart pointers must be part of the background of every programmer. Surprisingly enough this is not the case in several situations and many candidates who are not aware of them.

The intuition is very simple: when you assign an area of memory to a (naked) pointer, you must remember to deallocate that memory when you are no longer using it. This is the typical situation which can create leaks because it is easy to forget to deallocate an area of memory in a complex program.Smart pointers deallocates the area of memory when they are no longer used, in the destructor. Since an area can be referred by many smart pointers we should have a shared counter where we store the number of active references. Here you have the code. For a more professional use, please refer boost.