rust/raii.md

% The Perils Of RAII

Ownership Based Resource Management (AKA RAII: Resource Acquisition Is Initialization) is
something you'll interact with a lot in Rust. Especially if you use the standard library.

Roughly speaking the pattern is as follows: to acquire a resource, you create an object that
manages it. To release the resource, you simply destroy the object, and it cleans up the
resource for you. The most common "resource"
this pattern manages is simply *memory*. `Box`, `Rc`, and basically everything in
`std::collections` is a convenience to enable correctly managing memory. This is particularly
important in Rust because we have no pervasive GC to rely on for memory management. Which is the
point, really: Rust is about control. However we are not limited to just memory.
Pretty much every other system resource like a thread, file, or socket is exposed through
this kind of API.