Cleaning up after an exception

[googler]

Is there a better strategy?

Not really. All the possibilities have been mentioned in the thread, but none of them are "better". IMHO, this is one of the biggest design flaws in C++. Ideally, the language should have a construct such as this...

{
     // ....
      char* p = new char[100];
      AddFinalizer {
            delete[] p;
     }
      // rest of function
}

with the semantics that the finalizer should be called regardless of how the function exits. Unfortunately, it doesn't.

You can use __try/__finally around the whole function body as long as you don't use C++ try/catch and you don't have local variables with destructors in the same function. This is Windows-specific, but since the forum is about Visual C++, I guess that's ok Even the __try/__finally construct is pretty awkward because it forces you to indent the whole function body.