I really want to like Zig. Honest question: why is Zig so resistant to some kind of RAII? RAII is the biggest improvement that C++ brings over C. Leaving it out of a system programming language 50 years later is just strange? And no, manual defer is not the solution.
I felt that way at first too but I’m less concerned about it the more I use Zig. Defer and errdefer are already a huge improvement over C. I won’t deny there’s more risk of forgetting to clean up than in Rust or C++, but Zig’s approach forces me to think more clearly about what’s going on. For example, instead of doing a slow tree traversal to free little bits of memory all over the place (which RAII would do implicitly), in Zig I’d probably use an arena and free it all at once. A similar principle applies to other non-memory resources too (though maybe not mutexes for example). I also think it would be difficult to achieve the flexibility of Zig’s unmanaged containers (where deinit takes a parameter) in a RAII language.