The "good" way to go about that would be to have a second "cleanup_value" attribute. (Or, since the standard would be creating new names, have "cleanup" and "c

The "good" way to go about that would be to have a second "cleanup_value" attribute. (Or, since the standard would be creating new names, have "cleanup" and "cleanup_ptr" instead. Assuming that this is a separate attribute namespace, which I believe it is[?]) FWIW, you do sometimes need the address of the variable. Particularly if it's some struct that is made a member of some container (e.g. linked list) temporarily - you need the original variable's address to unlink it.