The C++ Standard Library provides several classes to wrap resources accessed through pointers. To prevent memory leaks, you have to ensure that memory allocated on the free store is freed at some point. The idea of a smart pointer is that you treat an instance as if it is the pointer, so you use the * operator to dereference to get access to the object it points to or use the -> operator to access a member of the wrapped object. The smart pointer class will manage the lifetime of the pointer it wraps and will release the resource appropriately.

The Standard Library has three smart pointer classes: unique_ptr, shared_ptr, and weak_ptr. Each handles how the resource is released in a different way, and how or whether you can copy a pointer.