I don't agree they are useless - they don't stop you from accessing nullptrs, but they do help manage the lifetimes of your dynamically created objects. And I

I don't agree they are useless - they don't stop you from accessing nullptrs, but they do help manage the lifetimes of your dynamically created objects. And I haven't seen anything indicating unique_ptr is to be deprecated - maybe you're thinking about auto_ptr.