I'm tired of marketing boost as "modern C++". Alexei Alexandrescu, the author of "Modern C++ design" book has since gone on greener pastures and got involved with the D language. He participated in the design of D, and wrote a book about it.

Not using shared_ptr a code smell? If you're not able to keep track of your objects yourself, you should not be using C or C++. It's not that hard like you would like us believe.

Also, apart from the cost of maintaining reference counts, shared_ptr makes an extra allocation for the control block. Unless you take care and use make_shared, you end up with allocations that are twice as slow.

On a cynical side: Boost has become Dave Abrahams' business (1) He (and co.) have a vested interest in making you believe that the Boost-way is "the" way of writing "modern" (as defined by HIM and his followers) C++ code. I just wonder whether he had that much foresight, or just took the chance when he saw the opportunity.

(1) I remember once asking about obtaining slides about fusion from a past BoostCon conference and got a blank "no". Slides were available only to the people who paid to attend the conference.