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Wouldn't you have a problem with reference cycles in C++ smart pointers? Not sure if they do anything special to prevent this.

std::unique_ptr<> won't allow you to have 'owning' reference cycles; neither 'owning' reference cycles are really necessary in real-world programs.

std::weak_ptr is there for resolving reference cycles.

Which means you have to design around it. You can definitely run into problems with cyclical shared_ptr dependencies

Well, you have to do this for every language that does reference counting.

Either that, or have a cycle collector in addition to the normal reference counting optimizations.