The main thing you need to know about ARC is that you hardly ever need it, so it rarely matters what its performance is. If you find yourself using shared_ptr m

The main thing you need to know about ARC is that you hardly ever need it, so it rarely matters what its performance is. If you find yourself using shared_ptr much, stop. Also, its susceptibility to cycles doesn't matter, because it is a terrible way to manage graph nodes: just keep them in a vector, with indices instead of pointers.