> The whole idea of RAiI is that you Acquire a Resource in the constructor (during Initialization), so that the destructor can guarantee it gets de-allocated Y

> The whole idea of RAiI is that you Acquire a Resource in the constructor (during Initialization), so that the destructor can guarantee it gets de-allocated Yes, that's the meaning of the acronym means, but unfortunately it's really a misnomer. When we say RAII style programming, we rather mean scoped destruction to avoid manual resource management. A classic example would be using std::lock_guard over a raw std::mutex. Some RAII objects don't throw on resource acquisition failure (std::fstream) or they expect that resource acquisition can fail (std::unique_lock with std::try_to_lock tag). Other RAII objects might not require any resource in the constructor at al, instead their only job is to release the resource that is given to them, like std::unique_ptr.