I finally decided to switch to boost from my own implementation of some helper classes, and I noticed that scoped_ptr and scoped_array in boost lack the release method(). I had to fall back to std::auto_ptr. However, this seems like such a basic and fundamental problem that I have started to fear that I am missing something obvious... The usage I got used to was something like this: { scoped_ptr<A> temp( new A() ); verify( temp.get() ); // might throw store_in_a_very_special_place( temp.get() ); // might throw; and I should keep ownership if thrown temp.release(); } I though this was good practice to make code exception safe. Sure I could do it with try-catch but that gets messy if I allocate multiple instances etc. So the question is: 1) is there something wrong with the concept of release()? 2) if release() is not evil, is there any other reason why is it not in boost::scoped_*? Regards, Milutin Jovanovic