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Well don't know about the parent but you ruined my day. Thing I keep coming back to is the proportion of effort you have to spend learning and keeping up with

Well don't know about the parent but you ruined my day. Thing I keep coming back to is the proportion of effort you have to spend learning and keeping up with your tools vs the problem domain your working on. Feels like a big problem with C++ is how much energy the language itself uses up. A friend of mine is, unlike me, really really smart. He likes golang and hates C++. And not like he hasn't spent years professionally writing C++ code. I think the advantage of golang is he can write it reflexively. So all of his attention is on the problem not the language. Me I feel like the problem with C is not so much the language. It's that I'm always worried about stepping off a ledge. Things like defer would help. Because failing to clean up resources is a big problem with C.

foxfluff 5y ago
But is failing to clean up transient resources that are only allocated for the duration of one function (or block) really a big problem with C? These tend to be the easiest ones to handle (but admittedly a bit annoying & verbose without defer) and spot if missing. (Also: static analyzers are relatively good at pointing out resources leaked in a single function.) I think most of my functions that allocate a resource only release it on error; otherwise the allocated resource lives on and gets freed later by another function. Defer doesn't help at all here. It just helps with the trivial ones..
dataangel 5y ago
The silver lining is that really 99% of the time it just doesn't matter. I just explicitly initialize everything to zero/nullptr (unless I have a specific reason to want a different explicit value), and I only worry about looking up the particular rules if I need them in a situation where I know initialization can be a significant cost like a gigantic array. It is annoying to look up every time that happens but it's not that often.

foxfluff 5y ago

But is failing to clean up transient resources that are only allocated for the duration of one function (or block) really a big problem with C? These tend to be the easiest ones to handle (but admittedly a bit annoying & verbose without defer) and spot if missing. (Also: static analyzers are relatively good at pointing out resources leaked in a single function.) I think most of my functions that allocate a resource only release it on error; otherwise the allocated resource lives on and gets freed later by another function. Defer doesn't help at all here. It just helps with the trivial ones..

dataangel 5y ago

The silver lining is that really 99% of the time it just doesn't matter. I just explicitly initialize everything to zero/nullptr (unless I have a specific reason to want a different explicit value), and I only worry about looking up the particular rules if I need them in a situation where I know initialization can be a significant cost like a gigantic array. It is annoying to look up every time that happens but it's not that often.