pros and cons of smart pointers

Question

I came to know that smart pointer is used for resource management and supports RAII.

But what are the corner cases in which smart pointer doesn\'t seem smart and things

Answer 1

I would like to mention performance limitations. Smart pointers usually use atomic operations (such as InterlockedIncrement in Win32 API) for reference counting. These functions are significantly slower than plain integer arithmetic.

In most cases, this performance penalty is not a problem, just make sure you don't make too many unnecessary copies of the smart pointer object (prefer to pass the smart pointer by reference in function calls).