[la_barba]

> No RAII, so you have to explicitly handle cleanup at every point you may have to early-return an error (goto fail etc...).

I think RAII can be useful, but I've never found any use for it in systems level code that I write. Most of the time I'm dealing with resources that were allocated inside a systems library or an external component which just gives me a handle to the resource. I think this is a common enough scenario in systems code that I don't think its just me.

e.g.

    1. X = CreateResource()
    2. Y = TransformResource(X)
    3. ProcessNewResource(Y)
    4. Z = TransformResource(Y)
    5. etc. etc.

And so as you transform that resource, you will have multiple ways to unwind the resource depending on where the failure occurs. Even if you wrap X in some RAII container, you don't know what your destructor is going to look like.

Another con to RAII, especially when paired with shared-ownership smart pointers, is you lose predictability over your resource deallocs. You never know when the last pointer is going go out of scope, and if its a 'heavy' resource with a complicated unwind, you're going to get a CPU spike at an indeterminate time. I deal primarily with industrial automation code and I much prefer to have a smooth/even CPU graph. I think this issue is more relevant to systems code which is the context of this thread.