[plorkyeran]

using/ARM/etc. make classes which own non-memory resources a lot less awkward to deal with, but one of the big wins of RAII is that the caller doesn't have to know or care that you have things which require special cleanup.

[pkolaczk]

Agreed, however it is very easy to catch a forgotten close() automatically (IDEs do that), and, at least in my experience, most non-memory resources are used locally and not shared, so they are pretty easy.

On the other side, some programming techniques are hard or downright impossible without GC - e.g. heavy functional programming with immutable persistent structures.