Discussion

The most common use of containers is to store values held directly (e.g., vector<int>, set<string>). For containers of pointers: If the container owns the pointed-to objects, prefer a container of reference-counted smart pointers (e.g., list<shared_ptr<Widget> >); otherwise, a container of raw pointers (e.g., list<Widget*>) or of other pointer-like values such as iterators (e.g., list< vector<Widget>::iterator >) is fine.