[ycombobreaker]

> However, it means that you now have a close() method which you have to call on every exit path, because if you miss a path, that's a path which could have an exception thrown from a destructor.

Not true at all. `close` and the destructor should be idempotent. In the main path, `close` will get called and failure will propogate upward. In any other failure path, the destructor will attempt to perform the underlying close and allow the stack to unwind without any further interruption.

Of course, anyone can come up with pathological cases where this is not acceptable behavior from a high-reliability sub-component. And in such a situation, RAII may not be the best answer (nor would lexical scoping i.e. constructor/destructor, for that matter!) But in my experience, this approach is just fine for most application-level code.

[betterunix]

...or we could retool exceptions so that destructor exceptions are safe (as long as they are caught). Conditions in Common Lisp, for example:

http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/beyond-exception-handling-co...