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You've clearly never coded in C/C++ where it's your job as the coder to manage memory and other resources.

I'm confused. Are your comments only relevant to C/C++ when the thread is about Go and the question was what any language should do? Personally I was thinking about garbage collected finalizers such as in Java.

No.. Go did a half-assed version of reference counting on resources. Memory yes. File descriptors, no so much.

Edited to add: What's the point of continuing to discuss this if all you understand is .NET and not actually tried to manage C/C++ resources (without using boost smart pointers) by hand?

FWIW Go doesn't do any reference counting, its GC implementation is a concurrent mark and sweep. And also file descriptors are subject to the same mechanism, a finalizer is set on them and they will be closed when the associated object is collected.

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