alt Hacker NewsThe article is a bit dense, but what it's announcing is effectively golang's `defer` (with extra braces) or a limited form of C++'s RAII (with much less boilerplate).
Both RAII and `defer` have proven to be highly useful in real-world code. This seems like a good addition to the C language that I hope makes it into the standard.
Replies
Both 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.
> with extra braces
The extra braces appear to be optional according to the examples in https://www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG14/www/docs/n3734.pdf (see pages 13-14)
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.
To be fair, RAII is so much more than just automatic cleanup. It's a shame how misunderstood this idea has become over the years
Probably 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.