[brian-armstrong]

Defers just feel like a watered down version of what you get with good scoping and RAII. They're a half measure for something programming languages solved decades ago.

[mratzloff]

Go has a garbage collector. RAII is only viable in languages where destruction is predictable, like C++ or PHP.

[int_19h]

"defer" is effectively used for predictable destruction in Go, and a more automated RAII scheme could be used in its place.

C++/CLI is a language that targets a garbage-collected runtime, yet has full-fledged RAII semantics (they're mapped to CLR Dispose pattern).

[mratzloff]

Oh, I totally forgot about C++/CLI! You're absolutely right; that's my mistake. I do agree that RAII is preferable.

[pjmlp]

PHP also has a garbage collector.

Swift and D also have garbage collectors and support RAII.

And since I already see it coming, reference counting is a garbage collection implementation algorithm in computer science literature.

[mratzloff]

Yep, and I even referred to reference counting earlier in the week as garbage collection, so I'm going to assume I was having memory corruption with my answer. :-)

[pjmlp]

Hehe :)

[pcwalton]

The tracing GC certainly complicates things, but you can make it work with a "scope" keyword like in D.