TBH I am not a fan of defer. It requires you to remember to use it and to know what things need cleanup code to be called. I have done quite a few code reviews for go code at places I have worked in the past and people were always forgetting to close open file or sockets or other things that needed it resulting in quite a few memory leaks in production code. I got good at spotting these in reviews and even became a bit too proactive in pointing them out by highlighting things that looked like they needed to be closed but did not actually have a close method on them… You just cannot tell from the code alone and need to look up the documentation for everything that has a Open method on it.

So I much perfer rusts drop semantics or C++s RAII. Once something goes out of scope or otherwise freed it should automatically be cleaned up and not have to make the programmer remember to do so beforehand.

Now in a language like C which does not and likely wont have drop semantics or RAII then it might make sense as it is better then nothing at all. But I don’t understand that arguments for putting it in C++ at all.