It's not about what you use to point to the thing. It's about how you allocate the thing in the first place. Smart pointers are like a free pass to do things wi

It's not about what you use to point to the thing. It's about how you allocate the thing in the first place. Smart pointers are like a free pass to do things without consideration: they allow you to make progress without caring how your things are allocated, because they ease the pain that results from just allocating stuff on the global heap, lacking a systematic approach. Note that while smart pointers ease pain in the short term, there are subtle complications that arise from the constraints that they introduce. One is performance, in some cases the cost of generalized memory management can be too much. Memory fragmentation can be an issue too. RAII the mechanism is not free but requires compatible code and containers. I'm sure there are lots of projects that have broken under the added constraints introduce by such smart classes. And while smart pointers are orthogonal to systematic memory management, if you get the management right the use of smart pointers can easily become a net negative.