There's even a commonly used name for it: Resource Acquisition is Initialization (RAII). It's been around for many years, and is fundamental to modern C++ style. It's beyond steep to claim we've never heard of it, just because some language has a feature that helps make it easy. Python has "with," Ruby has blocks, many languages have higher-order functions. Not an uncommon concept.

This is just for resource allocation.

The pattern the article talks about is FAR more general -- it's about all reversible processes, even things that have nothing to do with allocation.

> This is just for resource allocation.

It's the same thing, you can represent the pair (operation, inverse) as a "resource". Python calls it "context management" (and context managers), the means are slightly different, the result's the same.

I agree that OP talks about something of a wider scope though, the language features described in these sub-threads are specialized solutions to precise issues, they're not generalized reversal of arbitrary operations.

Sentry classes, which are a generalization of RAII, are used idiomatically in C++ for non-allocation tasks, such as whitespace skipping, logging, and profiling.

Also mapping state to scope e.g. mutex objects that set/clear on ctor/dtor

We can add code to destructors to do general stuff, not only deallocation. The same applies for constructors.

In C++ this works amazingly well for objects in the stack (not in the heap, as you need call the destructor yourself).