Is there a better way of allocating/copying shared_array

Question

I have a stream object which provide GetBuffer() and GetBufferSize() methods. The GetBuffer method returns a raw uint8_t pointer. I want to pass (by value) this buffer to another object which expects a shared_array<uint8_t>. I'm using boost, (which I am fairly new to), and this is what I came up with.

// relevant protos for a and b
void BClass::SetData(shared_array<uint8_t> data, size_t data_len);
uint8_t* AClass::GetBuffer(void);
size_t AClass::GetBufferSize(void);

AClass a;
BClass b;

shared_array<uint8_t> data = shared_array<uint8_t>(new uint8_t[a.GetBufferSize()]);
memcpy(data.get(), a.GetBuffer(), a.GetBufferSize());
b.SetData(data, a.GetBufferSize());

It feels like there should be something similar to boost's make_shared that could clean this up. Am I missing something obvious?

Answer 1

In Boost 1.53 we've got make_shared for arrays. So your code could look like this:

shared_ptr<uint8_t[]> data = make_shared<uint8_t[]>(a.GetBufferSize());

Of course, then you'd need to change BClass::SetData signature, to accept shared_ptr instead of shared_array.