For C++ developers: Smart Pointers - What, Why, Which? Smart pointers are so useful for memory management in C++ that it's amazing that there isn't an STL implementation yet. The Boost smart pointer implementation is a good common implementation, though not an official standard.

The C++ committee is in the process of updating the standard with a Technical Release for this year. Smart pointers are on the agenda, along with regular expressions, polymorphic function pointers, meta language features (type traits, typeof, an auto-type, perhaps even a meta language for better templates), and a bunch of other things I don't completely understand.