Boost has had the BOOST_SCOPE_EXIT macro at least since Boost 1.38 (February 2009), a few months before the first public announcement of Go. Judging by the copy

Boost has had the BOOST_SCOPE_EXIT macro at least since Boost 1.38 (February 2009), a few months before the first public announcement of Go. Judging by the copyright, the earliest versions of this library (before acceptance into Boost) are from 2006, before Pike et. al. even started working on Go internally in Google. BOOST_SCOPE_EXIT in turn is based on Andrei Alexandrescu's pre-closure ScopeGuard implementation from 2000. Granted, both BOOST_SCOPE_EXIT and your defer macro work at block end, not function end, but I agree with OP that this is practically always the better approach, so I don't think we should look at this thing as C++ trying to copy go features with lousy hacks. It's probably the other way around, if anything. And modern implentations in C++ (like yours) are extremely straightforward.