[summerlight]

Arena allocation and smart pointer tackle fairly different problems. Not sure why you're conflating these different problems? I'm extensively using both of them on a fairly large code base (>10M) daily basis. Without smart pointers, I'm confident that engineers will need to spend 2x more time on figuring out actual ownership of pointers.

[tsimionescu]

In principle, with arena allocation you don't need to care about ownership at all, or at least you only care about it at the arena boundary.

[summerlight]

If you're working on a nice code base that has a very clean boundary across teams and infrastructures, have the arena boundary follow that principle and the system has relatively straightforward lifetime and ownership, then yes. Obviously this is not true for so-called "large scale software systems". Have you tried to bounce objects across arenas thanks to all the teams that wanted to "optimize" and "simplify" their memory allocation? Good luck with debugging that.

[teo_zero]

Why should you track ownership of the single objects if you're not going to free them one by one?

[gavinray]

You can also allocate an arena of memory, and hand out unique_ptr<std::span> of CHUNK_SIZE slices of it

So I also don't see how these are related

[tsimionescu]

The point of arenas is usually to not care about ownership for object graphs that are allocated in the same arena, and to avoid immediate destruction for said objects.

The typical pattern is to create an arena whose lifetime is the lifetime of some important operation in your program (say, serving a single request or processing a single frame), do all of the logic of that operation via simple allocation in the arena (ideally bump-pointer allocation), don't free/delete anything at all, then when the operation is finished, just free the arena itself (or don't, and reuse it for the next operation by just resetting the pointer).

This implies, or at least allows, a very different style of writing C++ than usual - no need for tracking ownership, so no RAII, so no constructors or destructors, so no smart pointers.

Of course, you can also write this kind of code with RAII and smart pointers (with nop destructors for non-resource objects), using placement new to construct objects inside the arena and so on. But it's not necessary, and some find it easier to avoid it.