alt Hacker NewsI think the parent's point is that we started with raw pointers to implement PIMPL, then we had std::unique_ptr, and now we have std::indirect. So there are now three different ways how PIMPL can be implemented, each has its gotcha's and subtle differences that one needs to keep in mind. In large codebases you will now have to deal with all three solutions being used, depending on how old the code is.
The point of each improvement is fewer easily-made errors. Having implicit deep copying handled avoids lots of errors with manually implementing it the oldest way.