Not sure that's the part of C++ I'd heap praise on. For one thing, real RAII invokes the destructor, not a constructor. If your constructor throws, the destructor isn't going to be called. If your destructor throws, you're one passing exception away from std::terminate. Plus malloc doesn't throw, though new sometimes does.

Or, construction could return an optional/maybe style thing that you branch on, and then you don't need goto (sorry, non-local come-from with pretty branding) in your base language.