[qsera]

>pretty reasonable

It starts out small. Then before you know the language is total shit. Python is a good example.

I am observing a very distinguishable phenomenon when internet makes very shallow ideas mainstream and ruin many many good things that stood the test of time.

I am not saying this is one of those instances, but what the parent comment makes sense to me. You can see another comment who now wants to go further and want destructors in C. Because of internet, such voices can now reach out to each other, gather and cause a change. But before, such voices would have to go through a lot of sensible heads before they would be able to reach each other. In other words, bad ideas got snuffed early before internet, but now they go mainstream easily.

So you see, it starts out slow, but then more and more stuff gets added which diverges more and more from the point.

[Galanwe]

I get your point, though in the specific case of defer, looks like we both agree it's really a good move. No more spaghetti of goto err_*; in complex initialization functions.

[qsera]

>we both agree it's really a good move

Actually I am not sure I do. It seems to me that even though `defer` is more explicit than destructors, it still falls under "spooky action at a distance" category.

[Galanwe]

I don't understand why destructors enter the discussion. This is C, there is no destructors. Are you comparing "adding destructors to C" vs "adding defer to C"?

The former would be bring so much in C that it wouldn't be C anymore.

And if your point is "you should switch to C++ to get destructors", then it seems out of topic. By very definition, if we're talking about language X and your answer is "switch to Y", this is an entirely different subject, of very few interest to people programming in X.

[qsera]

Sorry, I had some other thread that involved destructors in my head.

But the point is `defer` is still in "spooky action at a distance" category that I generally don't want in programming languages, especially in c.

[laserbeam]

Defer is not spooky action at a distance. It is an explicit statement that gets executed as written. Unlike (for example, a familiar feature which C doesn’t have) operator overloading… which causes code that looks like one thing (adition for example) behave like another (a function call). Defer does exactly what it says on the tin can (“move this line to the end of the scope”), just like goto does exactly what it claims to do.

Macros (in general) are way spookier than a defer statement.

[qsera]

>move this line to the end of the scope

Where it is invisible! What is so hard about this to understand?

>operator overloading..

Yes, but if we go by your argument, you can say it gets executed exactly as it is written. It is just that it is written (ie overloading) somewhere else ie "at distance"...just like a defer block that could be far from the end of the scope that is trigerring it

[Galanwe]

> `defer` is still in "spooky action at a distance" category

Agree, this is also why I'm a bit weary of it.

What brings me on the "pro" side is that, defer or not defer, there will need to be some kind of cleanup anyway. It's just a matter of where it is declared, and close to the acquisition is arguably better.

The caveat IMHO is that if a codebase is not consistent in its use, it could be worst.

[array_key_first]

But the real-world alternatives that people use are:

1. goto, which is "spooky action at a distance" to the nth degree. It's not even safe, you can goto anywhere, even out of scope.

2. cleanup attributes, which are not standard.

[qsera]

>goto, which is "spooky action at a distance" to the nth degree.

it is not.

[duckerude]

That comment is saying to use C++, not to add destructors to C.

[ubercore]

Modern Python is great :shrug: