[Spex_guy]

Ah interesting, yeah I suppose if we define "RAII" as just "automatically invoked configurable cleanup", there's no actual need to mark the beginning of the lifetime. All you need is to mark the end of the lifetime. This needs to be possible both from the language (for stack variables) and from user code (for ArrayList implementations). So you need something like a placement delete or explicit destructor invocation, but not necessarily a placement new or explicit creation.

I think I mix these up because placement new is necessary to have a concept of const fields that is meaningful to the optimizer. This would have been an alternate solution to the original vtable problem, but requires lifetimes over which the field is const. I had RAII categorized as another feature that required lifetimes, but I suppose it requires a less strict definition of lifetimes than is needed for const fields.