Antheus posted a pretty interesting article today (the "automatic destructors" bit, I couldn't give a monkeys about memory mapped files). Someone said in a thread the other day about consoles sometimes doing cold shutdown to save all the time of manually releasing resources that would just get reclaimed anyway, but I hadn't really thought about this in terms of PCs.

Given that pretty much all modern versions of Windows will now reclaim memory, GDI objects, file handles etc, should we really be manually releasing application-wide stuff at exit any more?

One problem I do see is that I understand some buggy graphics card drivers can fail to release video memory for textures, vbs etc unless they are manually released by the calling application. I'd assume this problem could also apply to other plug-in hardware - soundcard drivers, printer drivers etc.

But for purely OS-based resources, is the "let the kernel do it" approach now better than manually releasing them yourselves?

Rhetorical question, but would be interested to know what people think.