[smallstepforman]

The unique_ptr destructor is called on scope exit, and there are times you want this earlier before other critical code.

[jmalicki]

That's why you can define your own scope to control that.

[bluGill]

you can call release or reset as needed if you want the delete to happen early - and if you forget an obscure code path it still gets deleted on scope exit which is probably good enough for that path.