you've talked about that before, "we very often have to do unsafe memory things", and that a lot of things done in game dev end up violating a lot of principles that are taught in college, but to be honest I'm not sure. granted, I haven't worked directly in game dev before, but i've worked on some projects where runtime perf was the _only_ requirement... and I'm just not convinced that these issues couldn't be worked around using constructs like smart pointers, weak pointers, and just general design principles...

that said, the witness is one of my favorite games of all time, so I think its safe to say you know what you're doing