3 ms·

suppose you have a shared ptr and you pass it to a function with overloads for move and value. what should the compiler deduce? it can't tell if it's legal. i

• notacoward 8y ago
  If the compiler can't deduce what to do or whether it would be safe then sure, it should require the programmer to disambiguate. The keywords and underlying mechanisms should exist, just as with type casts and such. However, I see a lot of cases where what the intent is obvious and the result obviously safe. Often the compiler even manages to identify the one reasonable answer, but instead of applying it or at least presenting it to the user in readily applicable form it throws an error with the answer converted into standards-ese and surrounded with a dozen lines of irrelevant context. That's not helpful. I've worked on a lot of large old C codebases, mostly kernels and filesystems. Every one has developed its own way to handle issues of object lifetime, ownership, etc. I've seen dozens of implementations of automatic reference counting, borrowing, weak references, and so on. Some of them have been widely and rightly regarded as awful and a pain to use, but none of them were as bad as the mess that C++ imposes on a much larger audience. I see a lot of my colleagues submit to Stockholm Syndrome and accept it as the proper way of the world, but I'm not inclined to follow their lead without registering my objections first.