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I'm speaking about C++, where blind faith in RAII is widespread, so I don't know if Rust's implementation alleviates some of the accidental complexity.

But I suspect any system with constructors / destructors leads to a lot of the same implicit behaviors, unintended complications, and leaky abstractions, and I generally favor explicit Initialize() and Cleanup() functions that you call manually, even in languages that support the implicit/magic stuff.

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You were conflating details of C++'s object model and implementation of move semantics with RAII. Rust also makes heavy use of RAII, and the details of its object model and move semantics are not the same as C++'s.

The only thing that RAII requires is the concept of ownership, and a cleanup function that the compiler knows about. The one implicit thing here is the automatic insertion of calls to the cleanup function.

Rust doesn't have constructors*.

* Well, it kind of does, in so far there is a Ctor enum variant in the compiler implementation to represent the name of a type in the value namespace, but it is not overridable by end users and has no logic.

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