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That's funny. I like to beautify old C++ codebases by gradually moving them to C. Code is so much easier to read already without implicit member accesses (this-

That's funny. I like to beautify old C++ codebases by gradually moving them to C. Code is so much easier to read already without implicit member accesses (this->). When going through large codebases, that must be one of the most frequent questions I'm asking myself, "is this a global, local, or member variable?".

pjmlp 7y ago
Ah the beauty of use-after-free and memory corruption issues. /s
- jstimpfle 7y ago
  Try to find one here: https://github.com/jstimpfle/language https://github.com/jstimpfle/language Not every project can be written 100% in this style, but the problem is very often programmers trying to mimick C++, e.g. doing object oriented fine-grained initialization/destruction stuff in C.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Will actually have a go at it. As Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon have been reporting in multiple occasions, the problem goes beyond programmers trying to mimick C++. To the point that future Android versions will require hardware memory tagging enabled on ARM devices.
    - jstimpfle 7y ago
      Sure, I'm just saying that a lot of it is due to unsuitable approaches. If you're actually going to look at it, I just want to make clear that I've never fuzzed it or anything, beyond running valgrind maybe twice (should be mentioned in the git log). And on the functional side, I don't even know what state this project is in. I think I lost interest in it when I needed to implement yet another way to encode x86-64 instructions, since having both floats and doubles is a requirement to run interesting things with OpenGL. Let me know what problems you find!
einpoklum 7y ago
1. Because C has no shadowing of global variables by member variables? 2. If your classes have so many members that it isn't clear whether a variable is a member or not, that's a class design problem. 3. C is a simplistic, almost-assembly-like, language. It's a reasonable choice for some tasks, not a reasonable choice for others. We're talking about languages with stronger abstraction capabilities.
- jstimpfle 7y ago
  > 2. If your classes have so many members that it isn't clear whether a variable is a member or not, that's a class design problem. Now tell me why every OOP codebase I look at has this problem. ;-) The reason is the second "O" in OOP. Trying to switch on the type of a thing, where every thing has only one type (ignoring inheritance which is another problem, not a solution), means that people will put all sorts of unrelated things in one place.

pjmlp 7y ago

Ah the beauty of use-after-free and memory corruption issues. /s

jstimpfle 7y ago
Try to find one here: https://github.com/jstimpfle/language https://github.com/jstimpfle/language Not every project can be written 100% in this style, but the problem is very often programmers trying to mimick C++, e.g. doing object oriented fine-grained initialization/destruction stuff in C.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Will actually have a go at it. As Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon have been reporting in multiple occasions, the problem goes beyond programmers trying to mimick C++. To the point that future Android versions will require hardware memory tagging enabled on ARM devices.
  - jstimpfle 7y ago
    Sure, I'm just saying that a lot of it is due to unsuitable approaches. If you're actually going to look at it, I just want to make clear that I've never fuzzed it or anything, beyond running valgrind maybe twice (should be mentioned in the git log). And on the functional side, I don't even know what state this project is in. I think I lost interest in it when I needed to implement yet another way to encode x86-64 instructions, since having both floats and doubles is a requirement to run interesting things with OpenGL. Let me know what problems you find!

einpoklum 7y ago

1. Because C has no shadowing of global variables by member variables? 2. If your classes have so many members that it isn't clear whether a variable is a member or not, that's a class design problem. 3. C is a simplistic, almost-assembly-like, language. It's a reasonable choice for some tasks, not a reasonable choice for others. We're talking about languages with stronger abstraction capabilities.

jstimpfle 7y ago
> 2. If your classes have so many members that it isn't clear whether a variable is a member or not, that's a class design problem. Now tell me why every OOP codebase I look at has this problem. ;-) The reason is the second "O" in OOP. Trying to switch on the type of a thing, where every thing has only one type (ignoring inheritance which is another problem, not a solution), means that people will put all sorts of unrelated things in one place.