alt Hacker NewsThis certainly isn't RAII—the term is quite literal, Resource Acquisition Is Initialization, rather than calling code as the scope exits. This is the latter of course, not the former.
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ceteia • yesterday at 10:11 AM
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This certainly isn't RAII—the term is quite literal, Resource Acquisition Is Initialization, rather than calling code as the scope exits. This is the latter of course, not the former.
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People often say that "RAII" is kind of a misnomer; the real power of RAII is deterministic destruction. And I agree with this sentiment; resource acquisition is the boring part of RAII, deterministic destruction is where the utility comes from. In that sense, there's a clear analogy between RAII and defer.
But yeah, RAII can only provide deterministic destruction because resource acquisition is initialization. As long as resource acquisition is decoupled from initialization, you need to manually track whether a variable has been initialized or not, and make sure to only call a destruction function (be that by putting free() before a return or through 'defer my_type_destroy(my_var)') in the paths where you know that your variable is initialized.
So "A limited form of RAII" is probably the wrong way to think about it.