Sean Parent's "no raw pointers" guideline is often misunderstood as "avoid T* , use smart pointers instead", even though Sean explicitly included smart pointers in his definition of a raw pointer: "anything with implied ownership and reference semantics".
This talk presents a refinement of that guideline:
Pointers - smart or not - shall not appear in function signatures, neither as argument nor as return type.
The focus of this talk is how to implement classes as regular types while still supporting dynamic allocation, polymorphism, and sharing internally.
It shows how such value types can be implemented manually, without dedicated library support. It then follows the evolution of the language and library in gradually simplifying these abstractions: C++11 smart pointers ( unique_ptr and shared_ptr ), C++26 vocabulary types ( indirect and polymorphic ), as well as in-progress proposals ( copy_on_write and protocol ) are presented as tools to simplify writing safe abstractions, not as safe abstractions themselves.
Along the way, the talk revisits the Rules of 3/5/0, exception safety guidelines, const propagation, aliasing, and local reasoning.
The talk aims to make you stop passing pointers around.
