C++ is in fact where my experience with RAII comes from. Could you, for example, forget to make a destructor virtual in "safe" implementations of RAII?
Perhaps the real answer to "Why isn't RAII more popular?" is that C++ has poisoned the well for many programmers.
> C++ is in fact where my experience with RAII comes from. Could you, for example, forget to make a destructor virtual in "safe" implementations of RAII?
No, that would be unsound.
> Perhaps the real answer to "Why isn't RAII more popular?" is that C++ has poisoned the well for many programmers.
Totally agreed. (But that said, I think that Go, and most other languages, made the right decision when going with pervasive GC. It makes the language much simpler, both in terms of implementation and interface. It costs some performance, of course, but being as fast as C in all cases was never a design goal of Go, according to the FAQ. The complexity, both in interface and implementation, that languages buy into if they want safe manual RAII-style memory management is not trivial.)
Perhaps the real answer to "Why isn't RAII more popular?" is that C++ has poisoned the well for many programmers.