[devcodex]

I definitely like the cleanliness of this solution but I'm still not sure how to work this into the general solution yet. The purpose was to take an opportunity to learn about how to implement reusable library code (as well as test drive a few C++14 features).

That said, I do like this approach and it gives me more to consider when approaching a problem like this again. I'm writing to learn so I welcome the constructive criticism.

[michaelrmmiller]

Ah, good point! My code is pretty flawed... it's using new to allocate an SDL_Window! All of this is just aesthetics at a certain point and what you prefer. For me, I'd get bored writing make<SDL_Window, SDL_CreateWindow, SDL_DestroyWindow> over and over. One solution is to wrap that in a function make_window like you've done. The other would be to wrap it in a template function that uses traits to lookup the creator and deleter functions. Pretty much equivalent. I only slightly prefer the latter because it exposes the type of the object in the call.

Thanks for writing the article! I'm much more in this camp of writing thin resource management rather than full-blown wrappers. And even if I were writing a wrapper, I would use these same techniques you're exploring to manage the resource as a member. It removes the need for any boilerplate whatsoever and in one line expresses all you need to know about the semantics of the object.