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> Large codebases increasingly use the "C++ GC", aka RAII with std::shared_ptr, as the de-facto-standard way of managing memory.

Which large codebases? This is definitely not true for any of the browser engines (Gecko being the smallest at 6M LOC, and going up from there) for example.

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WebKit makes relatively heavy use of reference counted objects, though a custom reference counting implementation is used rather than std::shared_ptr. That said, there has been an increasing emphasis on preferring unique ownership to shared ownership of objects where possible.

I'm a little confused by your throwaway comment about Gecko being the smallest browser engine though. WebKit weighs in at less than 3 million lines of code, much smaller than the size you quote for Gecko.

Yeah, I was thinking Chromium when I wrote that and should have been more specific. 6M is all of Firefox.

And Gecko uses reference counting a lot too, of course... but most objects are stack allocated or uniquely owned. It's a very different situation from a language in which all objects are reference counted.

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