acceptable to use shared_ptr for entity lifetime management?

[boogeroo]

Hi, first off, thanks for providing this lib, I just got on it and really like the ability to pack data together for easy SIMD with little requirements on existing architecture.

Anyways back to my question, would it go against best-practices to wrap entities in class and have the ctor/dtor do cleanup from the registry it uses? I would like to use share_ptr to manage lifetime of entities because it makes async operations easier, where i can pass either a weak ptr if operations do not need to complete, or a shared_ptr if i need to guarantee an operation completes.

Thank you,
vincent

[skypjack]

All identifiers are plain integral values, and they are returned as is from the registry.
You can customize the entity storage to return shared pointers if you like, or you can wrap returned identifiers in shared pointers.
I'd probably use a components or something similar to notify a system that operations do not need to complete or that I need to guarantee an operation completes. But that's your call. 🙂