This article correctly observes that "many resources are not plain memory" and then goes on to advise users to close() a file in a destructor. However, one of the ways that files are not like memory is that while free() can never fail, fclose() can fail if writing is buffered and the final write fails. This is especially problematic in C++ since throwing from a destructor is dangerous. Whether you rely on RAII or GC to free files, you will not be able to catch this sort of error. It is precisely for this reason that GC is a mechanism for memory management, not resource management in general.