RE 1: Several languages (including Rust!) have annotations to force you to test the result code. However, they generally leave my_file in scope even in the er

RE 1: Several languages (including Rust!) have annotations to force you to test the result code. However, they generally leave my_file in scope even in the error path, which makes bugs easier to write, and which means the File type is forced to handle all the complexity of handling the case where the file wasn't successfully loaded for it's entire API surface. RE 2: Rust takes the C++ approach of allowing types to define their own cleanup which gets auto-invoked when the object goes out of scope, instead of forcing the calling code to worry about it. Specifically, Rust types can implement the auto-invoked "Drop" trait, basically equivalent to C++'s destructors. You only need to call close if you want to close a file early (e.g. before the end of the scope), in Rust, which is fairly rare. I vastly prefer this approach, but it admittedly doesn't play nicely with the... less deterministic lifetimes of objects in a garbage collected system, so I can understand why Python, C#, etc. have more explicit scope syntax for cleanup.