That is an obvious thing, and totally besides the point. Also, probably GC only helps little against this. Sure, actually calling the destructor can be delayed

That is an obvious thing, and totally besides the point. Also, probably GC only helps little against this. Sure, actually calling the destructor can be delayed in order to even out latency. You can do the same with RAII. Sometimes you can't do that though because you have certain constraints on the execution order of whatever routines you need to run. This is completely independent of whether you use manual cleanup or GC or RAII, however with GC it is weird/hard/impossible to synchronize the GC with the non-cleanup code.