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Preferring RAII over garbage collection is the decision that Rust made.

Probably the reason that more languages don't use RAII for memory management is safety. C++, even with RAII, is not safe—you can violate memory safety with certain uses of references and iterators. Rust has to go to great lengths (lifetimes and the borrow check—things that have only been in the research landscape) to make this safe.

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I'm actually a huge fan of Rust's memory model and wished Go had something similar, since it's faster to use smart pointers, and less calls to the garbage collector are required. I also love how rust uses three different kinds of pointers depending on how the memory is managed, and although it adds some complexity, it gives more semantic value to the data you are working with.

Unfortunately for me, the rust compiler is written in rust, so I would have to adventure to grab a Linux and try my hand at a cross compile before I can play with it on my OpenBSD box.

Or just install it on a Linux VM!

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