mathrick: but it's just not very true, if you look past the rhetoric and expectations that everything works like Java. I wouldn't mind if it was funny, but the humour's uninspired too. Complaining that RAII forces you to use "smart pointers" (the derogatory quotes are his) but that built-in pointers aren't smart is fatuous, and the focus on smart pointers that manage memory (rather than, say, scoped mutex locks, or commit/rollback-style transactions) betrays his poor understanding of the idiom. C++ allows management of any resource using RAII-style library types. Java allows management of memory resources using builtin GC but has no automatic management of other resources. Personally I prefer general library solutions for any type of resource to builtin ones that only work with memory, but that's just a preference and I wouldn't expend so much energy comparing apples and oranges. The author implies that non-memory resources are rare anyway, giving files as an example. I wonder what the author writes if he doesn't need to use mutexes, database handles, sockets etc. let alone "non-system" resources. I'm currently using RAII to manage login sessions with a futures exchange, so that I know it will logout correctly when the session object goes out of scope, rather than just dropping the connection. Conflating RAII solely with memory management and then comparing it to garbage collected memory is a strawman.