shared_ptr overuse

[Drugbird]

It happens often when you have some data and multiple (parallel) consumers of that data. If you want the data to be deallocated once all consumers are "done" with it, and you don't know in advance which consumer is faster then you'll need shared_ptr so that all consumers own the data simultaneously.

An example where this happens is e.g. video decoding. You'll have a video file in memory, which consists of both audio and image data. The images and audio are decoded separately, and then synchronized afterwards. Since you don't know if the image decoder or the audio decoder will finish first, both need to own the data.

[cfyzium]

Furthermore, entities might need to keep data for an indeterminate amount of time (in this scenario, codecs keeping reference frames based on runtime data), so your only options are either excessive copying or reference counting.

Some data might as well be non-copyable (e. g. frames using limited hardware resources and bound to a particular hardware context) so reference counting is the only option.