I was claiming you were picking nits because the main point of the comment is that smart pointer != reference counting, the incorrect "only" claim is somewhat o

I was claiming you were picking nits because the main point of the comment is that smart pointer != reference counting, the incorrect "only" claim is somewhat orthogonal. And, my point about the qualitative difference between the runtime behaviour is definitely true (although I'll now strength it to a quantitative one: moving a unique_ptr doesn't require dereferencing it, unlike a reference counted one, and nor does it require any synchronisation, unlike thread-safe reference counting ala shared_ptr). In any case, it is unfortunate that unique_ptr is not memory safe, but it also not at all notable, as pretty much nothing in C++ is completely memory safe (even the other smart pointers like shared_ptr).