Re: try, finally

[Ted Byers <r dot ted dot byers at rogers dot com>]

Looks like a routine C++ question.  Unless I missed
something, the RAII idiom applies.  Replace your naked
pointers by a class (an instance of a template such as
an std::auto_ptr would suffice; or the boost
shared_ptr is a good alternative should the semantics
of how you're using the object require it).  You
create an instance of your object holding the resource
and you are guaranteed it will be cleaned up
regardless of what exit path you follow.  If an
exception occurs, the instance of the class will be
cleaned up as part of how the stack is unwound.  If
you exit normally, it will be cleaned up once it goes
out of scope.  No need for syntactic sugar like
__try/__finally.

I don't know about what others prefer to do, or common
practice if there is such a thing, but to me what
passes for common sense is that avoiding vendor
extensions whenever possible minimizes the pain
experienced when the code must pass through another
suite of development tools.  And I like to pass my
code through two different tool chains, just to catch
potential issues that one is better at catching than
the other.  In other words, if it ain't in the
standard, I don't use it unless there is really no
other choice.  In the 15 years I have been using C++,
I have never found it necessary to use anything not in
the standard (since it first apeared), and as a result
I generally have no problem compiling it with any of
the tools I regularly use (GCC and MSVC).

What you say suggests you ought to take an hour or two
to study RAII (resource acquisition is
initialization), and see how far that allows you to
clean up obviously problematic code.

HTH

Ted