Hands-On Design Patterns with C++

Downsides of RAII

Honestly, there aren't any significant downsides to RAII. It is by far the most widely used idiom for resource management in C++. The only issue of significance to be aware of has to do with exceptions. Releasing a resource can fail, like anything else. The usual way in C++ to signal a failure is to throw an exception. When that is undesirable, we fall back on returning error codes from functions. With RAII, we can do neither of these things.

It is easy to understand why error codes are not an option—the destructor does not return anything. Also, we cannot write the error code into some status data member of the object, since the object is being destroyed and its data members are gone, as are the other local variables from ...