Tag: raii

One of the biggest such features – perhaps the biggest one – is RAII, C++’s and now Rust’s (somewhat oddly-named) scope-based feature for resource management. And while RAII is for managing all kinds of resources, its biggest use case is as part of a compile-time alternative to run-time garbage collection and reference counting.

I will start by talking about the problem that RAII was originally designed to solve. Then, I will re-hash the basics of how RAII works, and work through memory usage patterns where RAII needs to be combined with these other features, especially the borrow checker. Finally, I will discuss the downsides of these memory management techniques, especially performance implications and handling of cyclic data structures.