[yonilevy]

The majority of the comments seem to be negative, yet many of them reflect a misunderstanding of RAII. I've argued the exact argument the author does many times before and got similar responses, it seems to be hard to convey the power of RAII to people who haven't practiced it before. The meaning of RAII is that you can tie a resource to the lifetime of an object, in an environment where the object gets destroyed deterministically. There are two practical uses: 1) You can hide the fact an object is holding a resource from users of the object. 2) You can leverage the power of objects within the language and apply it to resources. The part regarding languages allowing something that might look similar with syntactic sugar didn't convey it's message very well. The syntactic sugar other languages are introducing is great on its own, but it's inferior to the object based approach since it doesn't allow (1) nor (2). It's annoying that languages with garbage collection support have gained a lot of attention solely due to the fact that you don't have to worry about freeing memory, while languages with RAII support in which you basically don't have to worry about freeing any resource, got none.

[mattgreenrocks]

Amen.

RAII will be in the next great language, as it is a useful tool. This is not an academic concern, it is something that happens all the time due to rushed deadlines, stressed developers, or simple naivete.

People love to slag off C++ but the higher-level devs have done some serious thinking about how to engineer robust programs. Sutter's 'Exceptional C++' is eye-opening the first time around, and the concepts are applicable to any language that has exception handling. Programming in a transactional manner has visibly improved my designs -- mostly through the paranoia that almost any statement could throw an exception.