[kylebgorman]

I feel the same way about C++ smart pointers, which are remarkably simple to use and understand.

[catnaroek]

While definitely an improvement over raw pointers, ultimately C++'s smart pointers still fall short in several ways: they can be null, there's no lifetime checking for references (so you can still use after free), there's no object freezing (so you can still have data races), etc.