FWIW, as a high performance C++ dev who likes Rust but considers unsafe the biggest issue by far, it's encouraging to see important folk within the project believe there are issues. Too often as a relative Rust outsider it feels like the attitude is "but the unsafe situation is okay because you'd barely ever actually need it!". Hope that unsafe continues to improve!
It's honestly unfortunate that rust has been sold so hard on memory safety, so that when C++ folk don't spend tons of time in memory issues they think rust is pointless.
I don't want rust for memory safety. I want it for things like proc macros, a sane module system, a good and accepted error handling system, destructive move, constrained generics, unified static and dynamic polymorphism, language level customization points, and many more things.
Duplicating meaning that the smart pointer deleter is going to need a copy of the allocator (or a pointer to it if you prefer, but allocators are already typically pointers). If your container is storing N separately allocated elements, holding them by unique_ptr instead of raw pointer will waste N pointers worth of space with commensurate extra cache use. Fine for homework but not production data structures.
If you control the order of destruction, then you're just manually asking for things to be destroyed, and not actually making use of the smart pointers main functionality. Why use them at that point? That's why I also used the phrase "meaningfully" use them earlier.
Look inside the STL, boost, abseil, etc. You'll very rarely see smart pointers used to implement containers/data structures.
I think there's a bit of confusion here around "value semantics".
No C++ smart pointer has "value semantics", relative to its target T. You can see this because == performs address comparison, not deep comparison, and `const` methods on the smart pointer can be used to mutate the target (e.g. in C++, operator* on unique_ptr is always const, and yields a T&).
This is in contrast to Rust, where Box performs deep equality, and has deep const/mut. In Rust, Box is basically just a wrapper around a value to have it on the heap (enabling things like dynamic polymorphism, like in C++). In C++, the pointer is its own entity, with its own separate equality, and so on.
Const-ness of operations, operator==, and assignment/copying behavior all have to be consistent with each other. For example, if `box` was simply `unique_ptr` with a copy constructor (somehow, and as the table in the blog post basically implies), then you would have that after `auto a = b;`, `a != b`, which obviously doesn't work. This means that the hypothetical `std::box` would have to have its comparison and const-ness adjusted as well. In C++ terms, this isn't really a pointer at all. The closest thing to what the author is suggesting is actually `polymorphic_value`, I believe, which IIRC has been proposed formally (note that it does not have pointer in the name).
Also as an aside, smart pointers are not suitable a) for building data structures in general, and b) building recursive data structures in particular. The former is because meaningfully using smart pointers (i.e. letting them handle destruction) inside an allocator aware data structure (as many C++ data structures tend to be, and even data structures in Rust) would require duplicating the allocator over and over. The latter is because compilers do not perform TCO in many real world examples (and certainly not in debug mode); if you write a linked list using `std::unique_ptr` the destructor will blow your stack.
It's a pretty drastic assertion (and quite HN worthy) that a whole industry is abusing their developers, based on not even one job, but your impression of a job based on an interview. And assertions like "they expected us never to see our family", because you couldn't take your laptop home? Maybe if you had taken that job, you would have left the office at 5 pm, 95% of the time. Maybe not, of course, but you don't actually know.
I've been working in HFT for nearly ten years, in multiple different roles. I've met well over a hundred developers in the business, have at least a dozen I'd call friends, who are spread over nearly as many companies at this point in time. Most folks have had overwhelmingly positive experiences in the industry. Like anything there are exceptions, but I've seen no evidence of a systemic problem in the field. I know a few people who left my firm to go to Facebook and found it more stressful there, for instance. Certainly, I've worked with very very experienced ex-gamedevs, who would say unequivocally that developer abuse is a far bigger systemic issue in game dev than in finance.
Obviously it's fine to post your take but it should be tempered by the relative amount of experience you have.