A couple scattered thoughts: - Defer is nice for cleanup, but I think destructors are the gold standard there. They're even simpler to reason about, you can't

A couple scattered thoughts: - Defer is nice for cleanup, but I think destructors are the gold standard there. They're even simpler to reason about, you can't forget to invoke them, and combined with move semantics they automate away a really wide range of cleanup scenarios. Another interesting difference is that adding destructor-based cleanup to an existing type that didn't previously have a destructor is often a backwards-compatible change. Lastly, GC'd languages like Go usually need to include some sort of finalizer mechanism in addition to the defer syntax, and finalizers are surprisingly complicated. - I don't think C should get full points for zero cost abstractions. There's a lot of pressure to use void*'s or intrusive structures in place of true generic containers like std::vector/Vec, and that comes with runtime overhead in practice.