RAII guards in Rust

While experimenting with scope rules in Rust, I ended up implementing a recurrent idea I had – a RAII guard that runs a function when the object goes out of scope. I’m well aware of scopeguard crate, but it has some stinky unsafe bits in its implementation.

I was never able to properly implement it, probably because my Rust skills weren’t good enough, but now I did. And I’m rather satisfied with it:

use std::ops::Deref;

/// Returns the object wrapped in a way that the associated closure will run
/// when it goes out of scope.
pub struct Guard<T, D: FnOnce(&mut T)> {
	asset: T,
	dropper: Option<D>,
}

impl<T, D: FnOnce(&mut T)> Drop for Guard<T, D> {
	fn drop(&mut self) {
		self.dropper.take()
			.map(|d| d(&mut self.asset));
	}
}

impl<T, D: FnOnce(&mut T)> Deref for Guard<T, D> {
	type Target = T;

	fn deref(&self) -> &Self::Target {
		&self.asset
	}
}

impl<T, D: FnOnce(&mut T)> Guard<T, D> {
	/// Creates a new `Guard` object.
	pub fn new(asset: T, dropper: D) -> Guard<T, D> {
		Self { asset, dropper: Some(dropper) }
	}
}

I though about writing stuff like this in WinSafe:

impl HWND {
	pub fn GetDC(self) -> WinResult<Guard<HDC, impl FnOnce(&mut HDC)>> {
		Ok(Guard::new(
			self.GetDC()?,
			move |hdc| {
				self.ReleaseDC(*hdc).expect("Guard crash.");
			},
		))
	}
}

But then there are big implications like CreateMenu, which may or may not require a DestroyMenu call. These dubious behaviors are very unsettling, and many questions arise:

• Should I write another method, with a _guarded suffix?
• Mark the unguarded original as unsafe?
• In the example above, self is copied into the closure – what if it’s still zero?

So by now I believe I’ll leave everything as it is, and let the defer-lite crate at hand when needed.

Still, I greatly miss the idiomatic defer in Go.