How to force only smart pointers instance for a class?

Question

I've been working on a way to prevent user of using a class without smart pointers. Thus, forcing them to have the object being heap allocated and managed by smart pointers. In order to get such a result, I've tried the following :

#include <memory>
class A
{
private :
    ~A {}
    // To force use of A only with std::unique_ptr
    friend std::default_delete<A>;
};

This work pretty well if you only want your class users being capable of manipulating instance of your class through std::unique_ptr. But it doesn't work for std::shared_ptr. So I'd like to know if you had any ideas to get such a behavior. The only solution that I've found is doing the following (using friend std::allocator_traits<A>; was unsufficient) :

#include <memory>
class A
{
private :
    ~A {}
    // For std::shared_ptr use with g++
    friend __gnu_cxx::new_allocator<A>;
};

But this solution is not portable. Maybe I'm doing it the wrong way.

Answer 1

Create a friend'd factory function that returns a std::unique_ptr<A>, and make your class have no accessible constructors. But make the destructor available:

#include <memory>

class A;

template <class ...Args>
std::unique_ptr<A> make_A(Args&& ...args);

class A
{
public:
    ~A() = default;
private :
    A() = default;
    A(const A&) = delete;
    A& operator=(const A&) = delete;

    template <class ...Args>
    friend std::unique_ptr<A> make_A(Args&& ...args)
    {
        return std::unique_ptr<A>(new A(std::forward<Args>(args)...));
    }
};

Now your clients can obviously get a unique_ptr<A>:

std::unique_ptr<A> p1 = make_A();

But your clients can just as easily get a shared_ptr<A>:

std::shared_ptr<A> p2 = make_A();

Because std::shared_ptr can be constructed from a std::unique_ptr. And if you have any user-written smart pointers, all they have to do to be interoperable with your system is create a constructor that takes a std::unique_ptr, just like std::shared_ptr has, and this is very easy to do:

template <class T>
class my_smart_ptr
{
    T* ptr_;
public:
    my_smart_ptr(std::unique_ptr<T> p)
        : ptr_(p.release())
    {
    }
    // ...
};