RAII (Resource Acquisition is Initialization)

The idea of RAII is that resource lifetime is tied to object lifetime. Resources are more than just memory - they can be file descriptors, sockets or a variety of things.

RAII ensures that whenever an object goes out of scope, its destructor is called and its owned resources are freed. This means you never have to manually free memory and protects you against resource leaks (like memory leaks).

Modern C++ actually supports RAII, which is part of a drive to improve C++ memory safety. It is worth noting, however, that RAII is no silver bullet - with pointers in C++ the same as always, RAII can still allow for memory corruption, as it does nothing about dangling pointers. Every little help, though!

We will soon see that Rust massively buffs up RAII with a host of compile-time checks, providing proper security.