Nope. Only those with "if (this->inner_resource) { /* delete inner resource */ }" inside the destructor could count, others wouldn't. Edit: actually, nevermind

Nope. Only those with "if (this->inner_resource) { /* delete inner resource */ }" inside the destructor could count, others wouldn't. Edit: actually, nevermind. You are (almost) right: all objects with automatic storage duration and with non-trivial destructors are, very pedantically speaking, reference counted; but objects with dynamic storage duration are not. So RAII works by leveraging the built-in very primitive and restricted (binary) form of reference counting and builds on top of it to be able to reference-count objects with dynamic storage duration as well.