Some regular quotes from the community (not making any judgment value):
- What is the "correct way" of write C++ in "modern days"?
- "Be a man" an manage your own memory.
Safe programming (or the concept) aim to reduces crashes, memory leaks, access violations.
With C++11 we are moving to concepts such smart pointers in favor of raw pointers.
The problem we are trying to solve: allocate memory in the heap. That is a big problem.
The language evolved (and is evolving) in order to reduce human errors. The idea behind the new concepts of the language is to make developers life easier and make more robust code bases.
I want to allocate a block of memory in the heap, and that memory exists until you explicitly delete it ("raw pointer's way").
What happens if we forget to delete (deallocate) this memory?
- it could be harmless, we didn't even notice it.
- or could be catastrophic.s
Normally we should use smart pointers because they make our life easier and safer, but it's also ok to use raw pointers especially because it's good to understand how pointers work "under the hood".