> You're also introducing a reference count, but that's besides the point.
How so? RAII absolutely doesn't imply reference counting.
You may also want to pass a resource through something like a channel, promise/future pair or similar. So it's not just down/up the callstack, sometimes it's "sideways". In those cases RAII is a life savior. Otherwise you have to explicitly remember about covering all possibilities:
- what if resource never enters the channel
- what if it enters the channel but never gets retrieved on the other side
- what if the channel gets closed
- what if other side tries to retrieve but cancels
Or you leak the resource.
In Jai/Odin, every scope has default global and temp allocators, there's nothing stopping you from transferring ownership and/or passing pointers down the callstack. Then you either free in the last scope where the pointer lives or you pick a natural lifetime near the top of the callstack, defer clear temp there, and forget about it.