2 ms·

I think unique pointers are basically RAII for pointers, which does not help for lifetimes that aren't controlled by lexical scope. Shared pointers have referen

I think unique pointers are basically RAII for pointers, which does not help for lifetimes that aren't controlled by lexical scope. Shared pointers have reference counting overhead, which I think is used mainly for concurrent access in the kernel. Furthermore often kernel people want to "see" and control where stuff happens.

Too 10y ago
unique_ptr helps even outside lexical scope when transferring ownership through function arguments, it makes it much clearer that ownership is transferred as opposed to borrowed. It can also be controlled manually (not only by scope) by manually settings its contents to nullptr.