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Comment by anonymoushn | Hacker News Reader

> One nugget of knowledge I’ve worked out though - Zig is not a replacement for C. It is another replacement for C++.

While comptime is a potential source of complexity, I sort of think C++ developers won't accept a replacement that has no RAII or automatic invocation of destructors.

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Meh. Not trying to start a language war but I was grateful to switch from C++to Go when the price was to lose generics and a few other things in exchange for the language’s simplicity and clarity.

I think there are so many corners where people are using C++ that making generalizations about them is likely to fail.

That’s why I referred exclusively to my preferences. It is obviously the more comprehensive and versatile language.

I was mostly referring to gp's broad statements, comment was in support of your experience, which is good feedback to hear.

There's an open issue to add some kind of function annotation+errors for functions which require you to call a cleanup function.

The discussion has had a lot of back and forth and they haven't really settled on a desirable solution yet, but it's something they're hoping to add.

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/782

I work in games with C++ and we already do so much manual management and initialization+teardown functions that lack of RAII isn't a deal-breaker. Though I'd definitely prefer it if there was something either well-enforced or automatic.

This sounds good. While I don't have much preference about "being explicit" vs having automatically-invoked dtors, it will be nice to be nudged when I actually forget to clean up.

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