Will The Comittee remove plain arrays too? Now we have std::vector and std::array.

I love too. May be hard, but very efficient.

I am curious to know what your problem was exactly. In theory, a forward declaration should be sufficient for std::unique_ptr, as long as the deleter is not invoked (see Notes here: http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/memory/unique_ptr ). The problem we encountered was the default destructor of our class. Default destructors are inline, and thus need to invoke the deleter, which needs a type definition. However, as suggested in Scott Meyer’s Effective Modern C++, putting the destructor definition (with =default) in the implementation file instead of the header solved our issue.

By the way, our last attempt to convert to modern pointers stopped when we couldn’t declare a pointer to T anymore by just using a forward reference to the class name. This makes large systems impossible to create. And this is not a joke.