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In Defense of C++

(dayvster.com)
185 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 16 Sep 25 19:40 UTC | HN request time: 0.315s | source
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nzeid ◴[16 Sep 25 21:21 UTC] No.45268229[source]▶
> Just using Rust will not magically make your application safe; it will just make it a lot harder to have memory leaks or safety issues.

You know, not sure I even agree with the memory leaks part. If you define a memory leak very narrowly as forgetting to free a pointer, this is correct. But in my experience working with many languages including C/C++, forgotten pointers are almost never the problem. You're gonna be dealing with issues involving "peaky" memory usage e.g. erroneously persistent references to objects or bursty memory allocation patterns. And these occur in all languages.

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1. andrewmcwatters ◴[16 Sep 25 21:49 UTC] No.45268599[source]▶
What's worse in languages like Go, which I love, is that you won't even immediately how to solve this unless you have experience dropping down into doing things you just would have normally done in C or C++.

Even the Go authors themselves on Go's website display a process of debugging memory usage that looks identical to a workflow you would have done in C++. So, like, what's the point? Just use C++.

I really do think Go is nice, but at this point I would relegate it to the workplace where I know I am working with a highly variable team of developers who in almost all cases will have a very poor background in debugging anything meaningful at all.