Hi, I'm new to this list, so apologies for any oversights or faux pas. I've been finding a lot of use for a type of smart pointer I call shared_ptr_nonnull, which is a variation on shared_ptr which is never allowed to be empty. Specifically: (1) It doesn't have reset() with no arguments, doesn't have a default constructor, and doesn't have implicit conversion to bool (which would always be true.) (2) It throws an exception whenever there's an attempt to make it empty, i.e. in constructors, reset, assignment, and swap. For convenience, it's implicitly convertible to shared_ptr, and I have all of shared_ptr's templated operators implemented with possible combinations of shared_ptr and shared_ptr_nonnull. Usually it can be used just by changing the type of a shared_ptr. We have a lot of shared_ptrs, especially member variables, which are claimed to be "always valid" and this class enforces that, at compile time (1) and runtime (2). Has there been any discussion of something like this? Does anybody have any thoughts, suggestions, criticisms? Who's in charge of the smart pointer library these days? Thanks, Luke