I find it a good rule of thumb to allocate and deallocate a resource at the same level in my design, and to maintain any associated handle at that level as well

I find it a good rule of thumb to allocate and deallocate a resource at the same level in my design, and to maintain any associated handle at that level as well. I have encountered few situations where this didn’t work well, and almost all of them arose because an external module introduced some form of unavoidable asymmetry at its interface. If you’re able to follow that pattern then safe handling of unusual control flows tends to follow naturally. You just adopt whatever mechanism your language provides for scheduling the code to clean up and release resources at the same time as you allocate those resources. Almost all mainstream languages at a higher level than C provide a suitable mechanism today: RAII, some variation of `with` or `using` block, try-finally, Lispy macros, Haskelly monad infrastructure, etc. That way, the only places you need to write any extra logic are the layers where you allocate/deallocate and possibly lower layers that manage side effects on those resources in the unusual case that they require a specific form of recovery beyond the default behaviour in the event of aborting early. Hopefully if you do have to work at low level like C or assembly language and you’re using forms of control flow that could bypass clean-up logic then you already have at least some coding standards established for how to manage resources safely as well.