> Sure there's a small overhead to smart pointers Not so small, and it has the potential to significantly speed down an application when not used wisely. Here

> Sure there's a small overhead to smart pointers Not so small, and it has the potential to significantly speed down an application when not used wisely. Here are e.g. some measurements where the programmer used C++11 and did everything with smart pointers: https://github.com/smarr/are-we-fast-yet/issues/80#issuecomment-1672960484 https://github.com/smarr/are-we-fast-yet/issues/80#issuecomm.... There was a speed down between factor 2 and 10 compared with the bare-bone C++98 implementation. Also remember that smart pointers create memory leaks when used with circular references, and there is an additional memory allocation involved with each smart pointer. > Garbage collection has an overhead too of course The Boehm GC is surprisingly efficient. See e.g. these measurements: https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon/blob/master/testcases/Are-we-fast-yet/Are-we-fast-yet_results_linux.pdf https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon/blob/master/testcase.... The same benchmark suite as above is compared with different versions of Mono (using the generational GC) and the C code (using Boehm GC) generated with my Oberon compiler. The latter only is 20% slower than the native C++98 version, and still twice as fast as Mono 5.