Hands-On Design Patterns with C++

RAII in a nutshell

The basic idea behind RAII is very simple—there is one kind of function in C++ that is guaranteed to be called automatically, and that is the destructor of an object created on the stack, or the destructor of an object that is a data member of another object (in the latter case, the guarantee holds only if the containing class itself is destroyed). If we could hook up the release of the resource to the destructor of such an object, then the release could not be forgotten or skipped. It stands to reason that if releasing the resource is handled by the destructor, acquiring it should be handled by the constructor during the initialization of the object. Hence the full meaning of RAII as introduced in the title of this chapter— ...