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

Another use case may be 3rd party library returning raw pointer which is internally covered by own intrusive reference counting (or own memory management - which is not covered by any API/user interface).

Good example is OpenSceneGraph and their implementation of osg::ref_ptr container and osg::Referenced base class.

Although it may be possible to use shared_ptr, the intrusive reference counting is way better for scene graph like use cases.

Personally I do see anything "smart" on the unique_ptr. It is just scope locked new & delete. Although shared_ptr looks way better, it requires overhead which is in many practical cases unacceptable.

So in general my use case is:

When dealing with non-STL raw pointer wrappers.