[monocasa]

I've seen Jason Gregory talk about per frame arenas in Game Engine Architecture as a fundamental piece of how the Naughty Dog engines tend to work.

Totally agreed that they aren't required for shipping great console games (and they're really hard to use effectively in C++ since you're pretty much guaranteed to have hanging references if you don't have ascetic levels of discipline). This is mainly just meant as a "here's an example of how they can be used and are by at least one shop".

[foota]

Seems like this could be handled with a wrapper type with runtime checks during debug?

Like make any pointer to the per frame allocation be a TempPointer or something and then assert they're all gone with a static count variable of them? Then you just have to be cautious whenever you pass a reference to one or convert to a raw pointer.

I don't think this would be too awful for performance in debug builds.

[monocasa]

Yeah, or a generation system where the pointer holds a frame count too that's asserted on deref.

The point though is that it's a step back still from shared_ptr/unique_ptr by becoming a runtime check instead of compile time.