3 ms·

C has known memory footguns. C++, due to it's complexity, has footnukes.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
No, I actually think the opposite. In most C++ environments you will have std::string, STL vectors, unique_ptr, and RAII generally. Cleaning up memory via RAII discipline is standard programming practice. Manual frees are not typical these days. std::string manages its own memory, and isn't vulnerable to the same buffer overflow/null terminator safety issues that C-style strings are. While in C you will be probably using null-terminated strings and probably your own hand-rolled linked list and vectors. You will not have RAII or destructors, so you will have manual frees all over. Perhaps the big difference is that due to the nature of the language, C developers on the whole are probably more careful.
- ttfkam 3y ago
  I started coding professionally in C++ back around 2000. Many things have improved in C++ such as the items you list above, but C++ remains a viciously complicated language that requires constant vigilance while coding in it, especially when more than one thread is involved. CloudFlare is not lacking in good engineers with tons of both C and C++ experience. They still chose Rust for their replacement of Nginx. Now their crashes are so few and far between, they uncover kernel bugs rather than app-level bugs. https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-we-built-pingora-the-proxy-that-connects-cloudflare-to-the-internet/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-we-built-pingora-the-proxy-t... > Since Pingora's inception we’ve served a few hundred trillion requests and have yet to crash due to our service code. I have never heard anything close to that level of reliability from a C or C++ codebase. Never. And I've worked with truly great programmers before on modern C++ projects. C++ may not have limits, but humans writing C++ provably do.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    I'm not sure who you're arguing against, but it's not me, or it's off topic completely. The discussion and my reply was not between C/C++ and Rust, but between C and C++. I'm a full-time Rust developer FWIW. But I also did C++ for 10 years prior and worked in the language on and off since the mid-90s. Nobody is arguing in this sub-thread about Rust vs C++, nor am I interested in getting into your religious war.

No, I actually think the opposite. In most C++ environments you will have std::string, STL vectors, unique_ptr, and RAII generally. Cleaning up memory via RAII discipline is standard programming practice. Manual frees are not typical these days. std::string manages its own memory, and isn't vulnerable to the same buffer overflow/null terminator safety issues that C-style strings are. While in C you will be probably using null-terminated strings and probably your own hand-rolled linked list and vectors. You will not have RAII or destructors, so you will have manual frees all over. Perhaps the big difference is that due to the nature of the language, C developers on the whole are probably more careful.

ttfkam 3y ago
I started coding professionally in C++ back around 2000. Many things have improved in C++ such as the items you list above, but C++ remains a viciously complicated language that requires constant vigilance while coding in it, especially when more than one thread is involved. CloudFlare is not lacking in good engineers with tons of both C and C++ experience. They still chose Rust for their replacement of Nginx. Now their crashes are so few and far between, they uncover kernel bugs rather than app-level bugs. https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-we-built-pingora-the-proxy-that-connects-cloudflare-to-the-internet/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-we-built-pingora-the-proxy-t... > Since Pingora's inception we’ve served a few hundred trillion requests and have yet to crash due to our service code. I have never heard anything close to that level of reliability from a C or C++ codebase. Never. And I've worked with truly great programmers before on modern C++ projects. C++ may not have limits, but humans writing C++ provably do.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  I'm not sure who you're arguing against, but it's not me, or it's off topic completely. The discussion and my reply was not between C/C++ and Rust, but between C and C++. I'm a full-time Rust developer FWIW. But I also did C++ for 10 years prior and worked in the language on and off since the mid-90s. Nobody is arguing in this sub-thread about Rust vs C++, nor am I interested in getting into your religious war.