[chlorion]

Yeah! That's what I meant when I said arenas solve a different problem! I don't think I mentioned using unique_ptr with the arena and I didn't mean to suggest that if I did. My point was that arenas are not a replacement for unique_ptr at all, and instead solve a different problem where allocations don't have a simple and deterministic lifetime.

With an arena ideally you can just pass out actual references (T&) to callers instead of pointers!

[tsimionescu]

I believe that there are certain situations where one may choose between scope-based memory management and arena-based. Even for the example of the rendering code of a frame, instead of allocating inside an arena, you could choose to allocate an object graph owned by some frame-level object, that is de-allocated once the frame is rendered.