Smart Pointers, Part II and TBD (CMake?)

6:00-6:15: Arrival & Introductions
6:15-6:45: Talk 1, "Smart Pointers, Part II" by Pat Mills
6:45-6:55: Questions
7:00-7:30: Talk 2, TBD. (maybe CMake)
7:30-7:40: Questions
7:40-8:00: Free-form discussion

We will have food and drinks available thanks to our sponsor, Shift5.

Abstract for Talk 1:

At the Feb 20 meeting, Harald did a great introduction to Smart Pointers. He went over many of the reasons we should be using them. However, if you have to integrate with other software packages, especially C based ones, it can be error-prone to grab and release their pointers. On a one-off, it's not too bad, but using a library like OpenSSL, you can have as many as three pointer-to-pointer arguments in a single call. A utility class developed by someone else and summarized on SO comes to the rescue. ptrptr_type allows encapsulating these allocations in a std::unique_ptr.

This short talk will discuss why to use smart pointers for this type of memory management and present a simple class for making it easier.