The point of the smart pointers is that they are RAII classes. If you have an object that manages more than a single resource, you open yourself up to all kind

The point of the smart pointers is that they are RAII classes. If you have an object that manages more than a single resource, you open yourself up to all kinds of exception safety and thread safety issues. For example, let's say you have a class that news up an object in its constructor. Presumably, the corresponding delete lives in the destructor. But if that constructor throws an exception, the destructor will never be called. If it throws the exception after the "new," then you have a memory leak. So basically, you need a class whose only job is to manage a single pointer. You could certainly roll your own smart pointer, but it would have to work pretty much exactly like one of the ones in the standard library.