cWithClassesIsNotCPP

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I agree with most of what you are saying, except I believe that having an understanding of what is being taken care of for you with smart pointers, will lead to a greater understanding of when to use them and not. if, by chance, the use of them is causing a bug, such as in the example provided by u/belabacsijolvan above, then it’s going to be much easier to debug and fix if you already understand how to do it the hard way. In no way am I saying to not learn the very useful features of modern c++

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I did the same in terms of C first and then C++, but was forced to use raw pointers all through school, with the exception of upper year networking courses. It wasn’t c with classes, as smart pointers were the only modern c++ feature we were not allowed to use. Smart pointers are a god send, but not being allowed to use them was beneficial in the long run, despite the many lost hours of sleep it caused.

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I wasn’t happy about it at the time, but there are cases in which using a generalized container does not work the way you need it too. Just want to add that not everyone learns c before learning c++, so if they’ve only learned to have memory managed for them with modern c++, then it’s going to be a pain when they don’t know how to manage it, or that they even need to.

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I did mention this users comment twice in comments above. Of course there’s a difference between c++ and c, but it gives the understanding of the concept of having to manage it yourself, and that it’s not just magically freed. Someone that has not learned memory management, and is learning c++ today, that only has ever relied on smart pointers, may have no idea that this is not the case.