RAII

Resource Acquisition Is Initialization, in short RAII, stands for a popular technique in C++, in which the resource acquisition and release are bound to the lifetime of an object. This means for a lock that the mutex will be locked in the constructor and unlocked in the destructor. This RAII implementation is also known as scoped locking.

Typical use cases in C++ are locks that handle the lifetime of its underlying mutex, smart pointers that handle the lifetime of its resource (memory), or containers of the standard template library that handle the lifetime of its elements.