This is why I wrote "this is not really accurate" as opposed to "this is wrong". The claim was considerably broader than "smart pointer != reference counting".

This is why I wrote "this is not really accurate" as opposed to "this is wrong". The claim was considerably broader than "smart pointer != reference counting". The deeper problem is that unique pointers essentially are a sort of linear/affine type system, but that C++ leaves the actual checks to the runtime (which implements some, but not all of them).