Resource Acquisition is Initialization (RAII)

Introduced in CS247. I don’t fully understand what this does.

RAII is a programming concept used in C++ to manage resources like memory, file handles, etc. It links resource management to object lifetime:

Acquisition: Resources are acquired in a constructor
Release: Resources are released in a destructor
Automatic Management: When an object goes out of scope, its destructor is automatically called, releasing the resources

RAII is a C++ programming technique which binds the life cycle of a resource that must be acquired before use to the lifetime of an object.

Resources

https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/raii

Example:

{
	ifstream file{"file.txt"};
	...
}

Resource (file handler) is acquired in the constructor (initialization)
Resource is freed (closing the file) in the destructor

unique_ptr is RAII applied to dynamic memory