alt Hacker NewsProbably closer to defer in Zig than in Go, I would imagine. Defer in Go executes when the function deferred within returns; defer in Zig executes when the scope deferred within exits.
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CodesInChaos • yesterday at 10:02 AM
I wonder what the thought process of the Go designers was when coming up with that approach. Function scope is rarely what a user needs, has major pitfalls, and is more complex to implement in the compiler (need to append to an unbounded list).
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bashkiddie • yesterday at 9:35 AM
I would like to second this.
In Golang if you iterate over a thousand files and
defer File.close()
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jibal • yesterday at 2:30 PM
defer was invented by Andrei Alexandrescu who spelled it scope(exit)/scope(failure) [Zig's errdefer]/scope(success) ... it first appeared in D 2.0 after Andrei convinced Walter Bright to add it.
This is the crucial difference. Scope-based is much better.
By the way, GCC and Clang have attribute((cleanup)) (which is the same, scope-based clean-up) and have done for over a decade, and this is widely used in open source projects now.