alt Hacker NewsBoth defer and RAII have proven to be useful, but RAII has also proven to be quite harmful in cases, in the limit introducing a lot of hidden control flow.
I think that defer is actually limited in ways that are good - I don't see it introducing surprising control flow in the same way.
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fauigerzigerk • yesterday at 8:54 AM
But of course what you call "surprising" and "hidden" is also RAII's strength.
It allows library authors to take responsibility for cleaning up resources in exactly one place rather than forcing library users to insert a defer call in every single place the library is used.
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Defer is also hidden control flow. At the end of every block, you need to read backwards in the entire block to see if a defer was declared in order to determine where control will jump to. Please stop pretending that defer isn't hidden control flow.
> RAII has also proven to be quite harmful in cases
The downsides of defer are much worse than the "downsides" of RAII. Defer is manual and error-prone, something that you have to remember to do every single time.