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Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

I was disappointed not to see RAII on his list. I'd gladly leave C++ behind if I could keep my RAII and the well-designed STL (a great idea and implementation which is unfortunately uglified by C++-imposed verbosity.) Actually, I'd happily leave even the STL behind, but I always miss RAII.

Rust supports RAII, but it might be premature to include Rust in this kind of comparison.

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I agree. For me RAII is almost like a Litmus test. I can comfortably write away in C# for a while but there's always a point in time where I want RAII something and realize that it's something extremely useful you give up when transitioning to a GC language.

The author did mention that GC has been around for C and C++ for ages yet people don't seem to use it. If manual memory allocation was such a big problem for C++ programmers people would have adopted a GC library long ago.

Which is not to say Go might not gain traction for other reasons but it's not really clear to me what problem it solves, even after reading the otherwise very entertaining and informative article.

I would posit that if you choose to use C it is because you want to micromanage performance (kernel, strict hardware constraints, etc) and therefore do not want GC, and if your environment is compatible with GC, you may as well go further to C# or Java or another high-level language that gives you even more goodies.

The D programming language has strong support for RAII, and of course has Andrei's range based algorithms library, which in my not-so-humble opinion is superior to the STL.

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