[lbrandy]

Indeed. Sorry OP, your solution:

(1) avoids best practice (RAII) using...

(2) a flawed rationale (ignoring the existence of compiler optimizations)...

(3) without measurement to demonstrate the supposed flaw in the best practice (which would have surfaced the flawed rationale)...

(4) and therefore implements a micro-optimization with no actual win...

(5) and introduces a bug in the process (it's not exception safe).

[s_kanev]

OP here. Totally agree. TIL about RAII. That particular codebase doesn't use c++ exceptions, but still not a reason for a roll-your-own solution if something as efficient is in the standard library.

[dicroce]

Does it use the STL? The STL will throw. Does it use the new operator? new will throw unless you specifically tell it not to.

[s_kanev]

Ok, should've been more specific -- it doesn't catch any exceptions and lets them bring down the program and have the project maintainer check what they did wrong.