> it seems smart pointer overhead could be automatically and safely reduced (in same way one can do it manually) by the compiler lowering the generated code to

> it seems smart pointer overhead could be automatically and safely reduced (in same way one can do it manually) by the compiler lowering the generated code to use raw pointers where permissible. The sheer difficulty of doing this is one of the motivations behind Rust's borrow checker, which uses a combination of type system and static analyses to prove the safety without running anything. In fact this problem is probably easier to solve for languages where everything is GC-managed; those languages would have a heavy runtime which can transparently handle that in principle!