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Not everything is a nail...Not everything is a nail...Posted Jan 26, 2011 12:32 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341)In reply to: Not everything is a nail... by jrn Parent article: Sobotka: Why GIMP is inadequate
For me RAII in the abstract is an object/resource-lifetime management strategy, such that creation and destruction of composite objects appear atomic wrt resources/objects held internally, as far as users of the object are concerned. Obviously it's good programming to try make objects atomic in this way when designing code.
C++ has implicit calls to constructors and destructors, which tie in to scoping. C doesn't have that, true, and requires explicit construction and destruction (you can still hide destruction behind refcounting, obv). It's often bad practice and/or a sign of a (quick)? hack when C code uses automatic allocating for non-trivial, composite objects.
Whether language support for implicit ctor/dtors tied with scoping is required for a practice to be called RAII, I don't know. I guess to a C++ person it does. Still, the general sentiment of RAII seems more widely applicable than C++.
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Not everything is a nail... Posted Jan 26, 2011 19:52 UTC (Wed) by daglwn (subscriber, #65432) [Link]
Implicit destruction (finalization, uninit or whatever you want to call it) seems to me integrally tied to the concept of RAII. Without it, one ends up having to cover all exit points of a scope with explicit calls to cleanup code. Either this means there are several such calls scattered around parts of the enclosing scope or there's a big ugly goto to a common piece of cleanup code. Neither is particularly attractive or maintainable.
This gets to be impossible if the exit points are not known statically. C++ exceptions are a classic example but since some seem to think the C++ exception model is broken, I will emphasize that the problem is NOT solved by eliminating exceptions. One still has to cover all exit points with cleanup code.
Perhaps a better term for this would have been "resource ownership is object lifetime."
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