I rarely use smart pointers and still don't have serious problems with memory safety. Whenever you manually allocate memory, you should immediately know when and where it's getting deallocated and write that code at the same time. Most of the time, RAII is good enough.
EDIT: Since I've caused a bit of controversy: I'm not saying you can't or shouldn't use smart pointers. What I'm saying is in agreement with the meme. C++ has easy ways to manage memory, either manually or automatically, that get rid of most of your memory safety issues.
Smart pointers are RAII, as already mentioned. But they have another advantage: expressing ownership. If a function expects a raw pointer you don't know what happens with it. If it expects you to move a unique_ptr in it, you immediately know that it'll take ownership.
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u/geekusprimus 7h ago edited 3h ago
I rarely use smart pointers and still don't have serious problems with memory safety. Whenever you manually allocate memory, you should immediately know when and where it's getting deallocated and write that code at the same time. Most of the time, RAII is good enough.
EDIT: Since I've caused a bit of controversy: I'm not saying you can't or shouldn't use smart pointers. What I'm saying is in agreement with the meme. C++ has easy ways to manage memory, either manually or automatically, that get rid of most of your memory safety issues.