Why isn't it serious? I can imagine a smart pointer that actually accomplished the stated goal. So the joke is that they took a good idea and made a rubbish solution?
> I can imagine a smart pointer that actually accomplished the stated goal.
Can you elaborate on that?
If it requires you to free correctly, then you can just use plain C and the smart pointer isn't accomplishing anything. If it doesn't require that, how does it work?
Traditionally memory is considered "leaked" if it is still allocated but nothing point to it; i.e. there's no way to navigate to the allocation anymore.
He has made a joke "solution" by simply permanently storing a second pointer to all allocations so that by this definition they never technically leak. You can still always navigate to ever allocation so no allocation has leaked.
Of course it's not a real solution because it doesn't actually change the memory characteristics of a leaky program; it just hides the leak. In other words the technical description of the leak above isn't really the thing we care about.
Can you elaborate on that?
If it requires you to free correctly, then you can just use plain C and the smart pointer isn't accomplishing anything. If it doesn't require that, how does it work?