[bluGill]

For 95% of all code that is correct. std::make_* is easy to use and prevents a lot of mistakes, while having no loss of performance. That last 5% though you are doing weird things and so need to do something manually. (as the other poster said, make_unique is implemented with new) Of course the 5% is overall. Some projects never have anything that gets into that last 5%, while others it is more like 50% of the code can't use make_*. If at all possible your use of new/delete should be limited to a data structure/container than handles it, and not scatters all over.

[RossBencina]

"For 95% of all code that is correct. std::make_* is easy to use and prevents a lot of mistakes, while having no loss of performance."

For 95% of code std::unique_ptr has no loss of performance. Perhaps. Just remember that it is not a zero-cost abstraction, the compiler won't always be able to entirely eliminate the overhead:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHIkrotSwcc

[bluGill]

I watched that about 7 years ago when it first came out, and at an hour long I'm not about to watch it again... From what I can recall those are things that rarely are important. There is a cost, but in most real world code they only add a few nanoseconds - I have more important things to worry about.

[superxpro12]

As a firmware developer commonly operating on devices with 32MHz of cpu, i am offended sir.

[not_the_fda]

If your doing firmware you probably shouldn't be doing much memory allocation at runtime anyway to prevent memory fragmentation.

[bluGill]

Even at 32Mhz you typically have more important things to worry about. These nanoseconds are unlikely to add up - the overhead from the underlying new/delete is going to be much worse.

[smallstepforman]

The unique_ptr destructor is called on scope exit, and there are times you want this earlier before other critical code.

[jmalicki]

That's why you can define your own scope to control that.

[bluGill]

you can call release or reset as needed if you want the delete to happen early - and if you forget an obscure code path it still gets deleted on scope exit which is probably good enough for that path.