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Re:Five Popular Myths about C++: Postscript by StephanTLavavej on Tuesday December 30, 2014 @03:52PM (#8816675)
Correction: shared_ptr wasn't in C++98/03. It was originally developed in Boost, then added to TR1 (in 2005), and finally incorporated into C++11.

One of the major differences between shared_ptr and CComPtr is that shared_ptr is non-intrusive - it can manage anything, even things like ints that don't know anything about strong/weak refcounts.

Re:Five Popular Myths about C++: Postscript by dragontamer on Tuesday December 30, 2014 @06:21PM (#8817330)
My history was off, thanks for the clarification.

Nonetheless, the concepts revolving around CComPtr and all that good stuff can be easily seen in C++98 / STL. STL Strings for instance automatically clean themselves up under the principles of RAII.

Auto_ptr<>, the first smart pointer, also was standardized in C++98. While crude and primitive by today's standards (especially compared to unique_ptr<>'s explicit RValue semantics), auto_ptr<> shows me that even in the mid 90s, people understood the principles of RAII.

At least, if you were a learned C++ programmer.