The are a couple of options in C++. You can just use delete, as you mentioned, it is a C++ only construct as far as I know. For the std library smart pointer,

The are a couple of options in C++. You can just use delete, as you mentioned, it is a C++ only construct as far as I know. For the std library smart pointer, you can get their value (the raw pointer), delete that then assign nullptr to the smart pointer. I would consider this a code smell, and ask hard questions of the authors of such code. The simplest thing to do is to add new scopes. You can introduce as many blocks with { and } as you like. It is a common pattern to lock a mutex with a class that releases the mutex in its destructor (and acquired it in the constructor). The std library includes std::lock_guard[0]. To insure the smallest possible use of the lock a new scope can be introduce around just the critical section and the first line of the block can pass the mutex to the scope guard and it should be about as small and efficient as can be, while be exception safe and easy to write. Hopefully this is also easy to read. You can introduce new scopes with std::shared_ptr or std::unique_ptr as well. This seems common and reasonable. [0] - http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/thread/lock_guard http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/thread/lock_guard