Does C++ support 'finally' blocks? (And what's this 'RAII' I keep hearing about?)

Question

Does C++ support \'finally\' blocks?

What is the RAII idiom?

What is the difference between C++\'s RAII idiom and C#\'s \'using\' statement?

Answer 1

Beyond making clean up easy with stack-based objects, RAII is also useful because the same 'automatic' clean up occurs when the object is a member of another class. When the owning class is destructed, the resource managed by the RAII class gets cleaned up because the dtor for that class gets called as a result.

This means that when you reach RAII nirvana and all members in a class use RAII (like smart pointers), you can get away with a very simple (maybe even default) dtor for the owner class since it doesn't need to manually manage its member resource lifetimes.