RAII and smart pointers in C++

Question

In practice with C++, what is RAII, what are smart pointers, how are these implemented in a program and what are the benefits of using RAII with smart pointers?

Answer 1

Boost has a number of these including the ones in Boost.Interprocess for shared memory. It greatly simplifies memory management, especially in headache-inducing situations like when you have 5 processes sharing the same data structure: when everyone's done with a chunk of memory, you want it to automatically get freed & not have to sit there trying to figure out who should be responsible for calling delete on a chunk of memory, lest you end up with a memory leak, or a pointer which is mistakenly freed twice and may corrupt the whole heap.