RAII was something that C++ incidentally made possible. Nobody realized the power until after C++ existed. It was more of a "look at the cool thing we can do" when C++ was invented, only after did people realize just how great/powerful it is.
kind of both as I understand it. Destructors was something C++ was going for, but the full power doesn't seem to be something that was really understood for a long time after they existed. At least not in C++ as I remember it in those days. Maybe Bjarne has a better vision that my professors didn't share though.
They certainly didn't, because using destructors for RAII was already something I learnt in Turbo C++ 1.0 for MS-DOS manuals, back in 1993.
And by the time of Windows 3.x with OWL, Apple AppFramework, OS/2 CSet++, Motif++, they were used all over the place.
Easy to check those surviving manuals.
Also in 1995, the C++ lecture material at the university, back when everyone was implementing their own personal standard library, already discussed RAII design.
To note that even now there are plenty of universities that fail on their approach on how to teach C++, hence the Kate Gregory's talk aptly named "Stop teaching C" in the context of teaching C++.
