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?