I have not found in my own game programming experience that there's a whole lot of pointer soup, except in temporary scopes that can use stuff like arenas (inde

I have not found in my own game programming experience that there's a whole lot of pointer soup, except in temporary scopes that can use stuff like arenas (indeed, this would be pretty terrible for performance) and there's usually a pretty clear ownership structure to be found (ownership may be muddled in a logical sense, but this isn't that relevant from a memory management perspective). Perhaps this is because I'm using a language that doesn't mandate reference counting though, so it's easy to do stuff like just build up temporary references into arrays etc. when necessary...