This graph cuts off early. Once you learn that pointers are a trap for noobs that you should avoid outside really specific circumstances the line crosses zero and goes back into normal land.
Your graph also cuts out early. Eventually you want to get performance gains with multi-threading and concurrency, and then the line drops all the way into hell.
I’m not saying you can’t do multi-threading or concurrency in C++. The problem is that it’s far too easy to get data races or deadlocks by making subtle syntactical mistakes that the compiler doesn’t catch. pthreads does nothing to help with that.
If you don’t need to share any data across threads then sure, everything is easy, but I’ve never seen such a simple use case in my entire professional career.
All these people talking about “C++ is easy, just don’t use pointers!” must be writing the easiest applications of all time and also producing code that’s so inefficient they’d probably get performance gains by switching to Python.
I use thread sanitizer and address sanitizer in my CI, and they have certainly helped in some cases, but they don’t catch everything. In fact it’s the cases that they miss which are by far the most subtle instances of undefined behavior of all.
They also slow down execution so severely that I can’t use them when trying to recreate issues that occur in production.
That’s the problem of most general-use languages out there, including “safe” ones like Java or Go. They all require manual synchronization for shared mutable state.
There’s a difference between “You have to decide when to synchronize your state” and “If you make any very small mistake that appears to be perfectly fine in the absence of extremely rigorous scrutiny then this code block will cause a crash or some other incomprehensible undefined behavior 1/10000 times that it gets run, leaving you with no indication of what went wrong or where the problem is.”
I’ve been using C++ almost daily for the past 7 years and I haven’t found a use for shared_ptr, unique_ptr, etc. At what point does one stop being a noob?
Given that you probably are using pointers, and occasionally you are allocating memory, smart pointers handle deallocation for you. And yes, you can do it yourself but it is prone to errors and maybe sometimes you forget a case and memory doesn’t get deallocated and suddenly there is a leak in the program.
When you’re there, shared_ptr is used when you want to store the pointer in multiple locations, unique_ptr when you only want to have one instance of the pointer (you can move it around though).
Smart pointers are really really nice, I do recommend getting used to them (and all other features from c++11 forward).
First year programming in the late 90s … segmentation fault? I put printfs everywhere. Heh. You’d still get faults before the prints happened, such a pain to debug while learning. Though we weren’t really taught your point of the comment at the time.
Least that was my experience on an AIX system not sure if that was general or not, the crash before a print I mean.
Yea, pointer arithmetic is cute but at this point the compiler can do it better - just type everything correctly and use []… and, whenever possible, pass by reference!
This graph cuts off early. Once you learn that pointers are a trap for noobs that you should avoid outside really specific circumstances the line crosses zero and goes back into normal land.
Your graph also cuts out early. Eventually you want to get performance gains with multi-threading and concurrency, and then the line drops all the way into hell.
Good Afternoon Sir, have you heard about our lord and savior pthreads?
I’m not saying you can’t do multi-threading or concurrency in C++. The problem is that it’s far too easy to get data races or deadlocks by making subtle syntactical mistakes that the compiler doesn’t catch. pthreads does nothing to help with that.
If you don’t need to share any data across threads then sure, everything is easy, but I’ve never seen such a simple use case in my entire professional career.
All these people talking about “C++ is easy, just don’t use pointers!” must be writing the easiest applications of all time and also producing code that’s so inefficient they’d probably get performance gains by switching to Python.
Well, threadsanitizer catches them in runtime. Not sure about GCC static analyser and other SA tools.
I use thread sanitizer and address sanitizer in my CI, and they have certainly helped in some cases, but they don’t catch everything. In fact it’s the cases that they miss which are by far the most subtle instances of undefined behavior of all.
They also slow down execution so severely that I can’t use them when trying to recreate issues that occur in production.
That’s the problem of most general-use languages out there, including “safe” ones like Java or Go. They all require manual synchronization for shared mutable state.
There’s a difference between “You have to decide when to synchronize your state” and “If you make any very small mistake that appears to be perfectly fine in the absence of extremely rigorous scrutiny then this code block will cause a crash or some other incomprehensible undefined behavior 1/10000 times that it gets run, leaving you with no indication of what went wrong or where the problem is.”
pointers are fine, but when you learn about the preprocessor and templates and 75% of the STL it goes negative again
c++ templates are such a busted implementation of generics that if I didn’t have context I’d assume they were bad on purpose like malbolge
I’ve been using C++ almost daily for the past 7 years and I haven’t found a use for shared_ptr, unique_ptr, etc. At what point does one stop being a noob?
I recognize that trick question. For C++, the answer is always “soon”.
This guy probably still uses a char*.
What have you been using it daily for? arduino development? I’m hoping no company still lives in pre C++17 middle ages.
My company still uses c90. I just want to
for(uint8 i = 0;;)
🥹Given that you probably are using pointers, and occasionally you are allocating memory, smart pointers handle deallocation for you. And yes, you can do it yourself but it is prone to errors and maybe sometimes you forget a case and memory doesn’t get deallocated and suddenly there is a leak in the program.
When you’re there, shared_ptr is used when you want to store the pointer in multiple locations, unique_ptr when you only want to have one instance of the pointer (you can move it around though).
Smart pointers are really really nice, I do recommend getting used to them (and all other features from c++11 forward).
You’re recommending him to give up his sanity and/or life?
First year programming in the late 90s … segmentation fault? I put printfs everywhere. Heh. You’d still get faults before the prints happened, such a pain to debug while learning. Though we weren’t really taught your point of the comment at the time.
Least that was my experience on an AIX system not sure if that was general or not, the crash before a print I mean.
Faust bless Stallman for creating GDB.
Yea, pointer arithmetic is cute but at this point the compiler can do it better - just type everything correctly and use
[]
… and, whenever possible, pass by reference!