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611 points LorenDB | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.216s | source
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quietbritishjim ◴[] No.43913531[source]
I always enjoy reading articles like this. But the truth is, having written several 100s of KLOC in C++ (i.e., not an enormous amount but certainly my fair share) I just almost never have problems with this sort accidental conversion in practice. Perhaps it might trip me up occasionally, but will be noticed by literally just running the code once. Yes, that is an extra hurdle to trip over and resolve but that is trivial compared to the alternative of creating and using wrapper types - regardless of whether I'm using Rust or C++. And the cost of visual noise of wrapper types, already higher just at the writing stage, then continues to be a cost every time you read the code. It's just not worth it for the very minor benefit it brings.

(Named parameters would definitely be great, though. I use little structs of parameters where I think that's useful, and set their members one line at a time.)

I know that this is an extremist view, but: I feel the same way about Rust's borrow checker. I just very rarely have problems with memory errors in C++ code bases with a little thought applied to lifetimes and use of smart pointers. Certainly, lifetime bugs are massively overshadowed by logic and algorithmic bugs. Why would I want to totally reshape the way that I code in order to fix one of the least significant problems I encounter? I actually wish there were a variant of Rust with all its nice clean improvements over C++ except for lifetime annotations and the borrow checker.

Perhaps this is a symptom of the code I tend to write: code that has a lot of tricky mathematical algorithms in it, rather than just "plumbing" data between different sources. But actually I doubt it, so I'm surprised this isn't a more common view.

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1. viraptor ◴[] No.43913623[source]
> but will be noticed by literally just running the code once.

I assure you that's not the case. Maybe you didn't make that mistake, but if you did I'm sure it sometimes went unnoticed. I've found those issues in my code and in other projects. Sometimes they even temporarily don't matter, because someone did a func(CONST, 0) instead of func(0, CONST) and it turns out CONST is 0 - however the next person gets a crash because they change 0 to 1. A lot of similar issues come from the last line effect https://medium.com/@Code_Analysis/the-last-line-effect-7b1cb... and can last for years without being noticed.