I've grepped through the codebase of Firefox some time ago, and it was very very far from being modern, with a huge amount of naked news and deletes.
This is a straw man. Nobody in the C++ community action like the next release is a silver bullet. On the other hand, people in glass houses...
Smart pointers help (but do not solve) memory issues by tying together access and resource destruction. If you access a resource through an object, and the resource don't go away until the object does, it makes it harder to access the resource after it's gone. Not impossible since you can do various things like grab a raw pointer/reference to the smart pointer and then call reset. In practice though, this doesn't occur that often; Murphy is a bigger problem than Machiavelli.
You're entitled to your opinion but it goes directly against my experience, and most industry experience. Most C and old C++ codebases, memory management over time just becomes a tangled mess of ad hoc delete calls. With smart pointers this just hasn't happened and in practice spent tiny fractions of my time still dealing with memory related issues. A language with e.g. real reflection would be a way bigger boost to my productivity than improved memory management.
This is a straw man. Nobody in the C++ community action like the next release is a silver bullet. On the other hand, people in glass houses...
Smart pointers help (but do not solve) memory issues by tying together access and resource destruction. If you access a resource through an object, and the resource don't go away until the object does, it makes it harder to access the resource after it's gone. Not impossible since you can do various things like grab a raw pointer/reference to the smart pointer and then call reset. In practice though, this doesn't occur that often; Murphy is a bigger problem than Machiavelli.
You're entitled to your opinion but it goes directly against my experience, and most industry experience. Most C and old C++ codebases, memory management over time just becomes a tangled mess of ad hoc delete calls. With smart pointers this just hasn't happened and in practice spent tiny fractions of my time still dealing with memory related issues. A language with e.g. real reflection would be a way bigger boost to my productivity than improved memory management.