"performance" is about profiling and avoiding bottlenecks. That I'm using reference counting on the error path of my parser (so there's something wrong with th

"performance" is about profiling and avoiding bottlenecks. That I'm using reference counting on the error path of my parser (so there's something wrong with the input and the task is not going to complete) is very unlikely to become a bottleneck. You may have a point in that I navigated codebases that were plagued with shared ptrs everywhere in the past, and that general style of programming is not going to yield good performance. But you shouldn't deal in absolutes.