In Defense of C++

> Here’s a rule of thumb I like to follow for C++: make it look as much like C as you possibly can, and avoid using too many advanced features of the language unless you really need to.

Also, avoid using C++ classes while you're at it.

I recently had to go back to writing C++ professionally after a many-year hiatus. We code in C++23, and I got a book to refresh me on the basics as well as all the new features.

And man, doing OO in C++ just plain sucks. Needing to know things like copy and swap, and the Rule of Three/Five/Zero. Unless you're doing trivial things with classes, you'll need to know these things. If you don't need to know those things, you might as well stick to structs.

Now I'll grant C++23 is much nicer than C++03 (just import std!) I was so happy to hear about optional, only to find out how fairly useless it is compared to pretty much every language that has implemented a "Maybe" type. Why add the feature if the compiler is not going to protect you from dereferencing without checking?

std::optional does have dereference checking, but it's a run-time check: std::optional<T>::value(). Of course, you'll get an exception if the optional is empty, because there's nothing else for the callee to do.

But the dereference operator invokes UB if there is no value.

Which is a recurring theme in C++: the default behavior is unsafe (in order to be faster), and there is a method to do the safe thing. Which is exactly the opposite of what it should be.