5 ms·

> Way back around 2010, Mozilla was frustrated by the state of development in Firefox, a massive software project written mostly in C++. Despite best practices

> Way back around 2010, Mozilla was frustrated by the state of development in Firefox, a massive software project written mostly in C++. Despite best practices > Even so, manual memory manipulation is easy to get wrong, Even predating C++11, you should not have been doing manual memory management. I don’t think Mozilla was following best practices. IIRC, there were pointers everywhere. Even before C++11 best practices for C++ were to try for value semantics as much as possible. Mozilla code base was more like C with Classes than best practice C++.

klodolph 6y ago
I think the criticism, “But you were writing C++ wrong” falls more than a little flat. The Firefox codebase may be old, but even with teams of good, experienced C++ programmers I still see memory errors of the type that Rust is designed to prevent. Anyway, you are unlikely to avoid pointers completely in a good C++ codebase. Value semantics are very often the wrong semantics for the code you are trying to write. You can end up with dangling references as easily as you can end up with dangling pointers. If you use std::shared_ptr everywhere, then what you have is a slow & inefficient GC.
lostcolony 6y ago
So what in the language prevented them from doing it that way? What in the community ensured they didn't do it that way? Firefox is open source, and yet it still happened. "Best practices" is such a red herring. Best practices = don't write bugs, too; yet there are bugs. You can't evaluate a language in theory and ignore what happens in practice any more than you can with any other thing in life. It's the UX, does it do what users expect it to do, and is that the lowest friction path possible to achieve the goal. "You're not following best practices" is basically "you're holding it wrong". While arguably true, it is an attempt to excuse a bad design decision or impedance mismatch.
- dxuh 6y ago
  > "Best practices = don't write bugs" That's absolutely not what it means. Best practices usually means "don't use these features anymore" and "use these features whenever you can". And that is very reasonable and DOES get rid of a lot of the problems (not all) that are usually associated with C++, but still people don't do it. I blame it many C++-people actually preferring "C with classes" (various code bases openly prefers this as their coding style - you won't get those people on the Rust train either) and many people just don't know or don't trust it, because some of the newer features are sadly not very easy to understand properly.
  - lostcolony 6y ago
    You clearly missed the facetious tone of that part, along with the entire rest of the post. So let me simplify - if to use a language correctly requires knowing the full history of the language, along with explicitly eschewing some of the key features of the language (except in certain cases when you need them! And they're not deprecated or issue warnings or similar by the compiler), and even extremely experienced developers using the language still make mistakes...the issue is with the language.
sgift 6y ago
This is not a theoretical problem, it has been researched and the results are not encouraging even for "modern" C++. Either some of the biggest software companies (Mozilla, Microsoft, Google) are all incompetent or there is a problem with C++ in the real world which still hasn't changed despite "you only need to follow best practices in C++".

klodolph 6y ago

I think the criticism, “But you were writing C++ wrong” falls more than a little flat. The Firefox codebase may be old, but even with teams of good, experienced C++ programmers I still see memory errors of the type that Rust is designed to prevent. Anyway, you are unlikely to avoid pointers completely in a good C++ codebase. Value semantics are very often the wrong semantics for the code you are trying to write. You can end up with dangling references as easily as you can end up with dangling pointers. If you use std::shared_ptr everywhere, then what you have is a slow & inefficient GC.

lostcolony 6y ago

So what in the language prevented them from doing it that way? What in the community ensured they didn't do it that way? Firefox is open source, and yet it still happened. "Best practices" is such a red herring. Best practices = don't write bugs, too; yet there are bugs. You can't evaluate a language in theory and ignore what happens in practice any more than you can with any other thing in life. It's the UX, does it do what users expect it to do, and is that the lowest friction path possible to achieve the goal. "You're not following best practices" is basically "you're holding it wrong". While arguably true, it is an attempt to excuse a bad design decision or impedance mismatch.

dxuh 6y ago
> "Best practices = don't write bugs" That's absolutely not what it means. Best practices usually means "don't use these features anymore" and "use these features whenever you can". And that is very reasonable and DOES get rid of a lot of the problems (not all) that are usually associated with C++, but still people don't do it. I blame it many C++-people actually preferring "C with classes" (various code bases openly prefers this as their coding style - you won't get those people on the Rust train either) and many people just don't know or don't trust it, because some of the newer features are sadly not very easy to understand properly.
- lostcolony 6y ago
  You clearly missed the facetious tone of that part, along with the entire rest of the post. So let me simplify - if to use a language correctly requires knowing the full history of the language, along with explicitly eschewing some of the key features of the language (except in certain cases when you need them! And they're not deprecated or issue warnings or similar by the compiler), and even extremely experienced developers using the language still make mistakes...the issue is with the language.

sgift 6y ago

This is not a theoretical problem, it has been researched and the results are not encouraging even for "modern" C++. Either some of the biggest software companies (Mozilla, Microsoft, Google) are all incompetent or there is a problem with C++ in the real world which still hasn't changed despite "you only need to follow best practices in C++".