That was one lesson. There were others as well, and they're related. It was a temptation to believe that they were a kind of magic bullet that acted as a scoped

That was one lesson. There were others as well, and they're related. It was a temptation to believe that they were a kind of magic bullet that acted as a scoped resource scavenger. Mostly vtable jump resource cleanups through dtors in the usual way. Unfortunately it was slow, and as others have mentioned, sometimes difficult to debug and heap errors can propagate out of order, depending on other conditions. I'm in no doubt about the value of the auto_ptr variants. However I'm often brought in to speed up projects that don't meet performance requirements, and it often entails rethinking structure, simplification, replacing generalised ctor dtor lists, and rediscovering where const references, independently of move semantics, lead to algorithmic questions that need reexamining. This leads back to encompassing scope, and from there it's often the right thing to institute a better model. The benefit can be a lot less instructions and resultant speedups. Perhaps I've had too many of these jobs, but hey, it's a living.