Resource management in C++

Every program operates on resources and needs to manage them. The most commonly used resource is memory, of course. Hence, you often read about memory management in C++. But really, resources can be just about anything. Many programs exist specifically to manage real, tangible physical resources, or the more ephemeral (but no less valuable) digital ones. Money in bank accounts, airline seats, car parts and assembled cars, or even crates of milk—in today’s world, if it is something that needs to be counted and tracked, there is a piece of software somewhere that is doing it. But even in a program that does pure computations, there may be varied and complex resources, unless the program also eschews abstractions and operates at the level of bare numbers. For example, a physics simulation program may have particles as resources.

All of these resources have one thing in common—they need to be accounted for. They should not vanish without...