Defer is not spooky action at a distance. It is an explicit statement that gets executed as written. Unlike (for example, a familiar feature which C doesn’t have) operator overloading… which causes code that looks like one thing (adition for example) behave like another (a function call). Defer does exactly what it says on the tin can (“move this line to the end of the scope”), just like goto does exactly what it claims to do.

Macros (in general) are way spookier than a defer statement.

> `defer` is still in "spooky action at a distance" category

Agree, this is also why I'm a bit weary of it.

What brings me on the "pro" side is that, defer or not defer, there will need to be some kind of cleanup anyway. It's just a matter of where it is declared, and close to the acquisition is arguably better.

The caveat IMHO is that if a codebase is not consistent in its use, it could be worst.

But the real-world alternatives that people use are:

1. goto, which is "spooky action at a distance" to the nth degree. It's not even safe, you can goto anywhere, even out of scope.

2. cleanup attributes, which are not standard.