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For the longest time I've written my own smart pointers to manage the lifetime of pretty much anything that needs a cleanup - database connections, query objects, file handles, threads, mutexes and yes raw pointers.

All of this code built just fine on pre c++11 compilers, ran reliably, was performant and easy to maintain.

Rolling your own smart pointers is not something I'd discourage.

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It might be easy to maintain to you. Somebody who has to pick up that codebase later would have to spend time and effort figuring out all those custom smart pointers and their idiosyncrasies. If all they do in the end is the same as unique_ptr & shared_ptr, it's all wasted time.

> Somebody who has to pick up that codebase later would have to spend time and effort figuring out all those custom smart pointers and their idiosyncrasies.

If we're still on the topic of game engines, someone who cannot easily figure out a smart pointer implementation has no place working with the game engine's code in the first place.

Unreal Engine has its own implementation for that stuff and it took me literally minutes to get to grips with it - same with the custom engines in companies i worked at before. This has absolutely never been a real problem in practice.

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