It’s not a joke. What was described above is pretty much C++'s RAII pattern, which Rust evangelists love to present as a revolutionary Rust invention. Used with smart pointers, it will help avoid use-after-frees. What it doesn’t avoid is null pointer exceptions (you can std::move a unique_ptr and still access it, it’ll just be nullptr), but those will typically “just” be a crash rather than a gaping security hole.

That is not to say Rust doesn’t have its own innovations on top of that (notably that the compiler stringently enforces this pattern), and C++ does give you many more ways to break the rules and shoot yourself in the foot than Rust does.

I think the idea is that it’s easier to manage your resources in C++ if you write your code using RAII. Linux is mainly C, not C++, which makes resource management a little bit more manual.

Rust however categorically tries to stop these problems from happening in an even stronger way. You can still write bad code in any language, but it’s supposed to be a lot more difficult to get memory corruption.