You're missing the point. No, handles are not subject to such a problem because their lifetimes are explicit and distinct from the underlying resource. E.g. in

You're missing the point. No, handles are not subject to such a problem because their lifetimes are explicit and distinct from the underlying resource. E.g. in Win32, if you have a process handle, it will not ever refer to a process different from the one that it was originally created for until you specifically call CloseHandle on it. The OS will retain that handle in its table and will not reuse it for any other process. And yes, of course it would be trivially easy to do the same in Linux. Except for that whole part where it would break all the existing code relying on POSIX semantics.