Nobody says that an object with memory allocated using a bump allocator can't use RAII for other uses. The destructor could even call delete on the pointer to t

Nobody says that an object with memory allocated using a bump allocator can't use RAII for other uses. The destructor could even call delete on the pointer to the memory in the bump allocator and the bump allocator can happily implement delete as a noop or a tombstone operation of some sort. Now this does mean when you design your objects (see some talks on objects vs values for nuance there, oversimplified TLDR object exist in a place in memory but values are things that can be passed around) you need to make them aware of the allocator that allocated them. Values are generally stored in containers which the STL ones are allocator aware and you should be making your custom ones allocator aware too. Generally the expensive part of memory allocation isn't calling malloc, it's the underlying operations, when the underlying operation is +sizeof(T) and free is a noop you can happily keep using RAII and not care. CLARIFICATION: I'm saying having a T* member is an antipattern, make it std::unique_ptr with a custom deleter or it should be in a container, struct of arrays...