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Implementing Shared Pointers in C for Robust Memory Management

Mohit Mishra
Nerd For Tech
Published in
6 min readOct 24, 2024

Smart pointers are a powerful concept in modern programming, offering automatic memory management and safer pointer usage. While they’re commonly associated with C++, it’s possible and instructive to implement smart pointers in C. This blog post will dive deep into the concept, providing a detailed implementation and analysis of smart pointers in C.

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Understanding Smart Pointers

At its core, a smart pointer is an abstract data type that simulates a pointer while providing additional features, such as automatic memory management or bounds checking. The most common types of smart pointers are:

  1. Unique pointers
  2. Shared pointers
  3. Weak pointers

For this implementation, we’ll focus on creating a shared pointer in C.

Implementing a Shared Pointer in C

A shared pointer is a smart pointer that retains shared ownership of an object through a pointer. Several shared pointers may own the same object, and the object is destroyed when the last remaining shared pointer owning it is destroyed or reset.

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Nerd For Tech
Nerd For Tech

Published in Nerd For Tech

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Mohit Mishra
Mohit Mishra

Written by Mohit Mishra

engineer | engineering | doing what i love

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Or, as you said at the end, just use c++. Big issue here is manual decrement and increment