Reasons I can think of: - Wrapping all objects in shared pointer is annoying. - If you stick to that convention, you have to do it on every call side, while yo

Reasons I can think of: - Wrapping all objects in shared pointer is annoying. - If you stick to that convention, you have to do it on every call side, while you only have to implement RAII once. - You can enforce invariants of your class with RAII, that you can't with a plain shared_ptr - Regarding efficiency: It has the overhead of reference counting plus you have to store all objects on the heap instead of the stack. In hot loops this may hurt cache locality.