alt Hacker NewsWrapping every pointer in a smart pointer is very bad style; that suggests you simply have the bad level of abstraction in your code.
That problem seems even more prevalent in Rust, where I see Arc used everywhere, presumably as a cop-out not to have to figure out how to satisfy the borrow checker in smarter ways.
C++ doesn't have a smart ponter for 'i will not need this for longer than something else' - shared pointer gets the overhead of reference counting. Rust makes borrows easy - taking and returning a unique_ptr is conceptually the same thing but the syntax makes it tedious. Borrows don't cover the case of I'll store it but whole program analisys would show I won't store it as long as the owner (i'm not a rust expert but I think my understanding is right here)
both languages don't have a good way to handle circular references should you need them (again my rust isn't strong but I think that is right). You are correct to say avoid that - but sometimes you need them.