Re: [boost] Is there any interest in non-owning pointer-like types?

Naming: - I think pointer or reference like things should be named _ptr or _ref etc. (In comparison, optional and any can be null, but own their value, they don't reference an external value.) - 'observer' has already been taken by the Gang of Four as a design pattern. Unfortunately. We could re-take the term, but it does add confusion. - I've suggested cadged_ptr in the past - it is not a great word, as it it not very common, but it is actually the right meaning. And by not being common, it means we can imbue it with whatever meaning we'd like. In that sense it is a perfectly cromulent word. Tony On Thu, Feb 9, 2017 at 8:08 AM, Joseph Thomson via Boost wrote:

On Thu, Feb 2, 2017 at 6:18 AM, Niall Douglas wrote:

...

The GSL is a *much* better home for it than Boost because then you'll have Bjarne batting for it, plus static checking support from Microsoft in VS2017 and Google via clang-tidy. You'll also get a *huge* userbase almost instantly, because the GSL or rather one of its C++ 98 clones is seeing exponential growth recently. It's amazingly useful for upgrading ancient C++ codebases.

For those who are interested, I have included `observer<T>` (but not `observer_ptr<T>`) as part of a proposal regarding the recommended use of pointers over at the C++ Core Guidelines https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines. If you feel so inclined, you can continue the discussion in the issue I created. I have taken on board some of the feedback I received in this thread, so thanks very much.

Issue: https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/issues/847 Proposal: https://github.com/hpesoj/gsl-pointers

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