Why do C++ libraries and frameworks never use smart pointers?

Question

I read in a few articles that raw pointers should almost never be used. Instead they should always be wrapped inside smart pointers, whether it\'s scoped or shared pointers.

Answer 1

You shouldn't stay away from smart pointers, they have their use especially in applications where you have to pass a object around.

Libraries tend to either just return a value or populate a object. They don't usually have objects that need to be used in a lot of places, so there is no need for them to use smart pointers (at least not in their interface, they may use them internally).

I could take as example a library we have been working on, where after a few months of development I realized we only used pointers and smart pointers in a few classes (3-5% of all classes).

Passing variables by reference was enough in most places, we used smart pointers whenever we had a object that could be null, and raw pointers when a library that we used forced us to.

Edit (I can't comment because of my reputation): passing variables by reference is very flexible: if you want the object to be readonly you can use a const reference (you can still do some nasty casts to be able to write the object) but you get the maximum of protection possible (it's the same with smart pointers). But I do agree that it's much nicer to just return the object.