Hacker News Reader

Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

Go's defer works like RAII and does not introduce indentations.

    f := createFile("/tmp/defer.txt")
    defer closeFile(f)
    writeFile(f)

View on HN

Even when the syntax does require indentation ("with" in python, "using" in C#) it's still pretty clean IMO.

Additionally, `using` no longer requires indentation in C#

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-ref...

TIL!

I just recently updated a few small services to C# 12 and there's a bunch of little niceties like this I'm finding (spread operator for instance).

Using also no longer requires inheritance from IDispose, it suffices that the type does support Dispose pattern, which is great when coupled with extension methods.

Using no longer requires a new scope block in more recent versions of C#

Defer and context managers are a pale approximation of RAII. They are constrained to lexical scope, as opposed to RAII which works with object lifetimes. And it's the latter case which is much more error prone than 'oops, I forgot to close a file I opened this function'.

This misses the main benefit of RAII which is that you can't forget to close the file.

While not perfect, static analysis takes care of that, in similar veins C and C++ devs reach out to them for the language flaws.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com