Hands-On Design Patterns with C++

The RAII idiom

We have seen in the previous section how the ad hoc attempts to manage resources become unreliable, then error-prone, and eventually fail. What we need is to make sure that resource acquisition is always paired up with resource release, and that these two actions happen before and after the section of code that uses the resource respectively. In C++, this kind of bracketing of a code sequence by a pair of actions is known as the Execute Around design pattern.

For more information, see the article C++ Patterns – Executing Around Sequences by Kevlin Henney, available at http://www.two-sdg.demon.co.uk/curbralan/papers/europlop/ExecutingAroundSequences.pdf.

When specifically applied to resource management, this pattern is much ...