Are there any valid use cases to use new and delete, raw pointers or c-style arrays with modern C++?

Question

Here\'s a notable video (Stop teaching C) about that paradigm change to take in teaching the c++ language.

And an also notable blog post

Answer 1

One of the problem I deal with is mining big data structures for hardware design and language analysis with few hundred million elements. Memory usage and performance is a consideration.

Containers are a good convenient way to quickly assemble data and work with it, but the implementation uses extra memory and extra dereferences which affect both, the memory and performance. My recent experiment with replacing smart pointers with a different custom implementation provided about 20% performance gain in a verilog preprocessor. Few years ago I did compare custom lists and custom trees vs vectors/maps and also saw gains. The custom implementations rely on regular new/delete.

So, new/delete are useful in high-efficiency applications for custom designed data structs.