The idea in RAII is you create a type that's solely responsible for acquiring the resource and freeing it (and little else). This idea is indeed fundamental to

The idea in RAII is you create a type that's solely responsible for acquiring the resource and freeing it (and little else). This idea is indeed fundamental to modern C++ design. For example, smart pointers. When created, the pointer lives on the stack. The resource it points to lives elsewhere but that's no concern to RAII. When the stack variable goes out of scope the resource will automatically be freed (via the destructor) One place where this can break down in C++ is in copy and moves. The acquire/release works simply enough using constructors/destructors but correctly handling copies and moves has turned out to be harder to get right. And when you add in other objects that may refer to the resource object... well things can quickly become even harder to handle unless you're very careful.