If gRPC overhead is critical to your system, you've probably already lost the plot on performance in your overall architecture. You make a fair point about sma

If gRPC overhead is critical to your system, you've probably already lost the plot on performance in your overall architecture. You make a fair point about smart pointers, and median "modern C++" practices with STL data structures are unimpressive performance-wise compared to tuned custom data structures, but I can't imagine that idiomatic Java with GC overhead on top is any better.