> Question to C++ pros: are there not idioms that can be used and ruthlessly enforced to avoid such problems entirely? "In theory, yes - in practice, no." You

> Question to C++ pros: are there not idioms that can be used and ruthlessly enforced to avoid such problems entirely? "In theory, yes - in practice, no." You can use static analysis, vendor-specific annotations, runtime tools like clang's various sanitizers or valgrind, thorough code audits, use smart pointers instead of raw, have clear ownership semantics, follow MIRSA C guidelines, NASA guidelines, etc etc etc... but eventually your project will grow to the point where you'll botch an edge case, and the number of botched edge cases all your coworkers manage to add up will turn into a statistic. Even if me and all my coworkers were all godlings incapable of making mistakes, we'd still end up debugging plenty of memory safety issues - in second/third party code, sometimes without source code, and writing bug reports / workarounds as a result.