Defer available in gcc and clang

The 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.

A long overdue feature.

Though I do wonder what the chances are that the C subset of C++ will ever add this feature. I use my own homespun "scope exit" which runs a lambda in a destructor quite a bit, but every time I use it I wish I could just "defer" instead.

Such addition is great. But there is something even better - destructors in C++. Anyone who writes C should consider using C++ instead, where destructors provide a more convenient way for resources freeing.

C++ destructors are implicit, while defer is explicit.

You can just look at the code in front of you to see what defer is doing. With destructors, you need to know what type you have (not always easy to tell), then find its destructor, and all the destructors of its parent classes, to work out what's going to happen.

Sure, if the situation arises frequently, it's nice to be able to design a type that "just works" in C++. But if you need to clean up reliably in just this one place, C++ destructors are a very clunky solution.

As others have commented already: if you want to use C++, use C++. I suspect the majority of C programmers neither care nor want stuff like this; I still stay with C89 because I know it will be portable anywhere, and complexities like this are completely at odds with the reason to use C in the first place.