Question

I’m learning C++ and I saw that the source-code for a scope lock is quite simple. . How does it work, and how is this an example of “Resource Acquisition is Instantiation” (RAII) ?

Answer 1

The idea of RAII (Resource Acquisition Is Initialisation) is that creating an object and initialising it are joined together into one unseparable action. This generally means they’re performed in the object’s constructor.

Scoped locks work by locking a mutex when they are constructed, and unlocking it when they are destructed. The C++ rules guarantee that when control flow leaves a scope (even via an exception), objects local to the scope being exited are destructed correctly. This means using a scoped lock instead of manually calling lock() and unlock() makes it impossible to accidentally not unlock the mutex, e.g. when an exception is thrown in the middle of the code between lock() and unlock().

This principle applies to all scenarios of acquiring resources which have to be released, not just to locking mutexes. It’s good practice to provide such “scope guard” classes for other operations with similar syntax.

For example, I recently worked on a data structure class which normally sends signals when it’s modified, but these have to be disabled for some bulk operations. Providing a scope guard class which disables them at construction and re-enables them at destruction prevents potential unbalanced calls to the disable/enable functions.