RAII: Resource Acquisition Is Initialization
RAII may be the most important idiom. It is the idea that resources should be mapped to objects, so that their lifetimes are managed automatically according to the scope in which those objects are declared.
For example, if a file handle was declared on the stack, it should be implicitly closed once we return from the function (or loop, or whichever scope it was declared inside). If a dynamic memory allocation was allocated as a member of a class, it should be implicitly freed when that class instance is destroyed. And so on. Every kind of resource—memory allocations, file handles, database connections, sockets, and any other kind of resource that has to be acquired and released—should be wrapped inside such a RAII class, whose lifetime is determined by the scope in which it was declared.
One major advantage of this is that C++ guarantees that destructors are called when an object goes out of scope, regardless of how control is leaving that scope. Even if an exception is thrown, all local objects will go out of scope, and so their associated resources will get cleaned up.
void foo() {
std::fstream file("bar.txt"); // open a file "bar.txt"
if (rand() % 2) {
// if this exception is thrown, we leave the function, and so
// file's destructor is called, which closes the file handle.
throw std::exception();
}
// if the exception is not called, we leave the function normally, and so
// again, file's destructor is called, which closes the file handle.
}
Regardless of how we leave the function, and of what happens after the file is opened, we don’t need to explicitly close the file, or handle exceptions (e.g. try-finally) within that function. Instead, the file gets cleaned up because it is tied to a local object that gets destroyed when it goes out of scope.
RAII is also less-commonly known as SBRM (Scope-Bound Resource Management).
See also:
- ScopeGuard allows code to “automatically invoke an ‘undo’ operation .. in the event that an exception is thrown.”