I'm using a library written in C in a C++ project. I'd like to use C++ exceptions to handle C errors. In particular, it would be nice to have an exception thrown if an allocation fails. I can do this in constructors of classes which hold C-style pointers to C structs : if (c_object == NULL) throw std::bad_alloc(); But if the class is responsible for several C objects they are no ways of free-ing all already allocated pointers since the destructor isn't called. I have a feeling I could use smart-pointers, but I don't have much experience with them. What's more, I have to have access to the original C pointers to use the C api properly. Is there an elegant solution to this ?