In my recollection, smart pointers were a fairly common C++ idiom in the early 1990s. Ref-counted shared_ptr and scoped_ptr were even proposed in 1994 for standardization, but didn't quite make it (scoped_ptr mutated into auto_ptr). There were also cow, deep-copying, intrusive, and ref-linked smart pointers. It was easy to write your own smart pointer, while GC was something alien and magic.