An automated approach

Our goal is to encapsulate the just mentioned functionality into a class that relieves us from managing resources again and again. For resource management, the C++ idiom Resource Acquisition Is Initialization (RAII) comes in handy.

Note

RAII describes the principle that resources are acquired in a class' constructor and released in its destructor. Since both constructor and destructor are invoked automatically when the object is created or goes out of scope, there is no need to track resources manually. RAII is mostly used for automatic memory management (as in smart pointers), but it can be applied to any kind of resources. A great advantage of RAII over manual allocation and deallocation (such as new/delete pairs) is that deallocation is guaranteed to take place, even when there are multiple return statements or exceptions in a function. To achieve the same safety with manual memory management, every possible path would have to be protected with a delete operator. As...