Why is there no RAII in .NET?

Question

Being primarily a C++ developer the absence of RAII (Resource Acquisition Is Initialization) in Java and .NET has always bothered me. The fact that the onus of cleaning up i

Answer 1

You can do a form of RAII in .net and java using finalize() methods. A finalize() overload is called before the class is cleaned up by the GC and so can be used to clean up any resources that absolutely shouldn't be kept by the class (mutexes, sockets, file handles, etc). It still isn't deterministic though.

With .NET you can do some of this deterministically with the IDisposable interface and the using keyword, but this does have limitations (using construct when used required for deterministic behaviour, still no deterministic memory deallocation, not automatically used in classes, etc).

And yes, I feel there is a place for RAII ideas to be introduced into .NET and other managed languages, although the exact mechanism could be debated endlessly. The only other alternative I could see would be to introduce a GC that could handle arbitrary resource cleanup (not just memory) but then you have issues when said resources absolutely have to be released deterministically.