alt Hacker NewsThose types of allocation technique were common back in the day for efficiency reasons, maybe still relevant for things like embedded programming where you need to be more careful about memory usage and timing, but I would say that nowadays for normal application usage you are better off using smart pointers.
It's not a matter of one being strictly better than the other, but rather about using the right tool for the job.
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I disagree, as group lifetimes are conceptually and architecturally often easier and simpler than having lots of individual lifetimes managed by smart pointers. And sure, you can often slap shared_ptr around the place, or hopefully a less lazy smart ptr choice, but it makes the code harder to understand by obscuring ownership rather than eliminating it as a concern.
Many soft-realtime systems make use of these techniques, specifically 3D graphics and game engines.