[ah-]

You're completely right about shared_ptr not being the right tool for this use case.

However, I haven't tried it but just looked up the implementation of std::shared_ptr in GCC 4.9.0, and accessing it is exactly the same as with a raw pointer. operator-> and operator* just return the internal pointer and do nothing else.

There's some slight space overhead associated with shared_ptr, since it has to store the two counters for shared and weak references, so that might influence the runtime. unique_ptr should behave exactly like a raw pointer.

That said, I'd love to see some benchmarks about this as well and would be even happier to be proven wrong.

Another aspect I find interesting about this is that as the objects grow, it makes sense to store them in column-wise (one array/chunk of memory just for member1, one for member2, ...) instead of row-wise.

I don't know any languages besides Q that make this way of storing data easy/the default.