Indeed: maybe not a full "RAII" kind of feature but at least something simple that allows the author to specify (around the same place where a resource allocation happened, e.g.) that some other symmetric behavior should take place on any scope exit point.

Hm, ok my take on this is unexperienced; I come from Java and only learned C++ recently: I would like to have heap inspection tools which a VM would give you. Then you can remove the VM if/when you need performance and have profiled memory enough.