For almost all use cases, the issues mentioned don't even come up. You create a unique_ptr with std::make_unique, or a shared_ptr with std::make_shared. It li

For almost all use cases, the issues mentioned don't even come up. You create a unique_ptr with std::make_unique, or a shared_ptr with std::make_shared. It lives its entire life as that type, and when you no longer need it, you forget about it. The issues in the article had me banging my head, because they aren't how smart pointers are used in practice. The only time that you would call release(), for example, is when you are passing a pointer into a pre-C++11 API. Once you have done so, you wouldn't be worrying about calling delete anyways, because you have transferred ownership.