In Defense of C++

C++ and C rely, heavily, on skill and discipline instead of automated checks to stay safe. Over time, and in larger groups of people that always fails. People just aren't that disciplined and they get overconfident of their own skills (or level of discipline). Decades of endless memory leaks, buffer overflows, etc. and the related security issues, crash bugs, data corruption, etc. shows that no code base is really immune to this.

The best attitude in programmers (regardless of the language) is the awareness that "my code probably contains embarrassing bugs, I just haven't found them yet". Act accordingly.

There are of course lots of valid reasons to continue to use C/C++ on projects where it is used and there are a lot such projects. Rewrites are disruptive, time consuming, expensive, and risky.

It is true that there are ways in C++ to mitigate some of these issues. Mostly this boils down to using tools, libraries, and avoiding some of the more dark corners of the language and standard library. And if you have a large legacy code base, adopting some of these practices is prudent.

However, a lot of this stuff boils down to discipline and skill. You need to know what to use and do, and why. And then you need to be disciplined enough to stick with that. And hope that everybody around you is equally skilled and disciplined.

However, for new projects, there usually are valid alternatives. Even performance and memory are not the arguments they used to be. Rust seems to be building a decent reputation for combining compile time safety with performance and robustness; often beating C/C++ implementations of things where Rust is used to provide a drop in replacement. Given that, I can see why major companies are reluctant to take on new C/C++ projects. I don't think there are many (or any) upsides to the well documented downsides.

> C++ and C rely, heavily, on skill and discipline instead of automated checks to stay safe.

You can't sensibly talk about C and C++ as a single language. One is the most simple language there is, most of the rules to which can be held in the head of a single person while reading code.

The other is one of the most complex programming languages to ever have existed, in which even world-renowned experts in lose their facility for the language after a short break from it.

And yet, they both still suffer from the flaw that the parent comment cites. Describing a shared property doesn't imply a claim that they're the same language.

> And yet, they both still suffer from the flaw that the parent comment cites.

I dunno; the flaw is not really comparable, is it? The skill and discipline required to write C bug-free is an orders of magnitude less than the skill and discipline required to write C++.

Unless you read GGPs post to mean a flaw different to "skill and discipline required".