They have no real reason to exist. At best, they are syntactic sugar (auto_ptr), at worst they actually encourage poor design (shared_ptr). They are basically a crutch for programmers who grew up with managed languages and are afraid of raw pointers.
That's just false. The automated cleanup could be done manually, but the type safety is invaluable. Change how you want to handle ownership of a particular object as part of a refactoring. Now, find everywhere that assumes the previous model - if you use bare pointers, it's a pain in the ass. USE TYPES TO HELP YOU WRITE CORRECT CODE. I do a lot of this in my C code.
I happen to agree with the grandparent post. C++ is overbloated with features and when STL and templates came out, not all compilers even supported all their features. Not to say that templates themselves are bad, but there are too many things in C++. For example copy constructors vs initializers, (String)foo vs String(foo) etc. And now with C++0x and 11 we have even more. Lambdas? Concepts were about to be in there? Etc.
A programming language is supposed to be small so that programmers can share code. The rest can be handled with libraries. That's why C is better for huge projects. Linus agrees with me :)
In addition, why encourage reference counting pointers? If you really want to manage objects on the heap, have a garbage collected reference counted pointer.
How did we ever survive without them, before boost showed up? I seem to remember doing just fine. They are a symbol of the useless bloating of C++, a language trying to be all things to all people. A half-assed halfway house between managed and unmanaged. You're either a competent C++ coder, in which case you shouldn't need them, or you're new to the language, in which case they are obfuscating the details that you need to learn.
> transfer ownership
Then transfer ownership. The object that owns them encapsulates a container. When it is destroyed, it iterates the container and destroys the objects that it owns. So to transfer, take it out of that container and pass it to the new owner. It isn't rocket science.
>unknown lifetimes
Then you have a lazy, poor design. And that's the point really, managing your memory properly is an intellectual rigour - it forces you to improve your design, to be acutely aware of these issues. Not just spawn shared_ptrs and hope for the best. We have nice forgiving languages where you can be lazy. Coding in C# is like taking a holiday. C++ is meant to be hard.
I thought C++ was meant to be a lot of things but I don't think it being "hard" was one of the key points of its inception.
Just because you're using a "hard" language, it doesn't make you a better programmer. If the language can be made easier, more productive to write, with less problems and bugs due to memory leaks and inaccuracies, while not impacting performance, why wouldn't you want to do that?
That's like asking a marathon runner why he doesn't just hop in a car.
I use many languages. I use C# to knock out a GUI. VBA for a bit of spreadsheet work. Q/KDB+ for database/functional work. R for stats. All of these are far more productive than C++. If you want fancy abstractions, other languages have them by the bucketload.
I don't use C++ to be productive, and I don't expect to be. I use it to get close to the metal and have full control. Everything you code will take 4-5 times longer to write. And longer to compile. You will be careful because you have to be careful, and that's a good thing because with that care comes quality.
That's like asking a marathon runner why he doesn't just hop in a car.
Most C++ coders I've talked to (including all of the ones who get paid for doing it) are using C++ to get useful stuff built, not for the sake of 1337ness.
You are aware that recompiling with c++11 can improve the speed of existing STL code bases, right? (some bloat, move constructors are, and guess what, that makes transferring unique_ptr free [edit: as in no overhead over manually doing it]..) And you are aware that 95% of the code should not be performance critical, and be made easy to write? And you are aware that before standardized smart pointers everybody wrote their own by hand, to take advantage of RAII?
