title: RAII vs. Garbage Collector
body: <p>I recently watched a great talk by Herb Sutter about "Leak Free C++..." at CppCon 2016 where he talked about using smart pointers to implement RAII (Resource acquisition is initialization) - Concepts and how they solve most of the memory leaks issues.</p>
  
  <p>Now I was wondering. If I strictly follow RAII rules, which seems to be a good thing, why would that be any different from having a garbage collector in C++? I know that with RAII the programmer is in full control of when the resources are freed again, but is that in any case beneficial to just having a garbage collector? Would it really be less efficient? I even heard that having a garbage collector can be more efficient, as it can free larger chunks of memory at a time instead of freeing small memory pieces all over the code.</p>