With the advent of smart pointers, is it a sign of poor design if I see objects are deleted? I'm seeing some software components in our product that people are still doing this. This practice strikes me as un-idiomatic, but I need to be sure this is the industry consensus. I'm not starting a crusade but it'd be nice to be prepared theory wise. Edit: legit uses of delete, Klaim mentioned the object pool use case. I agree. Bad examples of using delete, I am seeing many new's in constructor or start() and corresponding delete's in the destructor or stop(), why not use scoped_ptr? It makes the code cleaner.