First available via the Boost library and introduced natively with C++11, shared pointers are an abstraction of memory management using reference counting for heap-allocated instances. They are partially thread-safe in that creating multiple shared pointer instances can be created, but the referenced object itself is not thread-safe.

Depending on the application, this may suffice, however. To make them properly thread-safe, one can use atomics. We will look at this in more detail in Chapter 8, Atomic Operations - Working with the Hardware.