What if C++ had explicit destruction?
Scope-based lifetime is a fantastic language feature, and it's a large contributing factor to the popularity of languages like Rust. C++ calls it RAII for historical reasons, but the general idea is that the compiler automatically inserts calls to cleanup functions (destructors) at the instant when the object ceases to be accessible (goes out of scope). This works very well for a wide variety of object types, such as allocated memory, operating system handles (e.g. files), locks/mutexes, logging, and more. The primary strength here is that the compiler doesn't let us forget to do a necessary operation. However, destructors in C++ are also incredibly limited compared to how they could be. They cannot take any parameters, and they cannot fail. You can of course add interfaces to set parameters in advance or to explicitly clean up before the destructor so you can check for failures, but those are things that can be forgotten. The compiler always remembers to call the destructor