You were conflating details of C++'s object model and implementation of move semantics with RAII. Rust also makes heavy use of RAII, and the details of its obje

You were conflating details of C++'s object model and implementation of move semantics with RAII. Rust also makes heavy use of RAII, and the details of its object model and move semantics are not the same as C++'s. The only thing that RAII requires is the concept of ownership, and a cleanup function that the compiler knows about. The one implicit thing here is the automatic insertion of calls to the cleanup function.