Sure, but at that point, it's not RAII all the way down. RAII is a great wrapper around new and delete, but I saw people talking about how they rarely use new

Sure, but at that point, it's not RAII all the way down. RAII is a great wrapper around new and delete, but I saw people talking about how they rarely use new and delete anymore. Edit: Actually, reading about auto_ptr<> and friends I see what you're getting at. The codebase I worked on some years ago didn't use those so I'm not totally familiar with that idiom for wrapping heap allocation.