Of course, you are right, I did not want to imply that we should call C++ a garbage collecting language just because it has shared_ptr. And you are right that you can achieve more optimal code if you can use you knowledge to decide when reference counting is necessary and when not. But there is just an enormous spectrum of cases where the convenience of a garbage collector - which gives you less (but not zero) opportunities for memory leaks and speeds up development - far outweighs the performance hit. And the performance hit is really not large, modern garbage collectors are highly tuned pieces of software. Obviously you probably don't want a GC run when you are in the middle of some timing critical driver code, but I never wanted to imply a black/white world where garbage collectors are the silver bullet. But the article is definitely wrong - garbage collection is not wrong (in all scenarios).