Yes I cannot fathom how you could write successful and maintainable C++ code without using RAII. How can you guarantee safe deterministic lifetimes of objects without using RAII?

By not using exceptions, and putting a delete at the end of the scope where your RAII object would have been cleaned up.

What about early return? In practice this logic becomes much very error-prone.

If you are writing high-reliability C (think military, aerospace, industrial control systems), early return is usually prohibited by coding standards. Then again, dynamic memory allocation usually is too.

Personally, I think early return is lazy programming because not cleaning up non-RAII objects is only one class of bugs that it can introduce. Things like vector renormalization, update notification and even later sections of algorithms can all be missed by early return. Not having early return means you need to explicitly skip later code if you don't want it, rather than essentially turning on "skip-all".

I know three solutions for this:

* (Classic): use goto so that instead of returning directly, all branches jump to a cleanup label. This is tricky to do well, but possible.

* (Nonstandard): GCC offers a nonstandard function attribute to register a function as a destructor for this kind of thing. I'm sure they claim it was inspired by Scheme's dynamic-wind/dynamic-wind concept.

* (Memory pooling): Apache APR relies heavily on memory pools. One feature of APR's memory pools is the ability to register functions to run (in, I believe, non-deterministic order) on data when the pool is eventually destroyed.

Aargh! I should look at nonstandard features that I don't use before I say they solve problems. GCC's construcotrs and destructors (outside of C++ code) are limited to globals and statics. Marking a function a constructor guarantees it's automatically called before main(), and marking a function a destructor guarantees it's automatically called after main() completes.

Naked new and deletes should be seen very little in code post-C++11.

Containers and resource handles are Stroustrup's advice in his blue C++ book.

Manual deletion is something I would never really want to see outside a destructor.