Comprehensive performance analysis of C++ smart pointers

摘要

Smart pointers play an important role in bypassing memory leaks in C++. Since C++11 standard the smart pointers have become widely-used tools because they let the programmers not to deal with memory deallocation. However, abstraction penalty occurs because of this convenience. Overhead is related to runtime, memory usage and compilation time. There are many different smart pointers in the standard library. However, the performance difference between the smart pointers and raw pointers is not measured before. This paper presents an analysis of their effectiveness. An alternative approach to the C++17’s optional construct is searched for.