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This is the sort of ideological thinking that holds back progress and it's something people have complained about in particular with the C++ standardization pro
by Kranar 3y ago
This is the sort of ideological thinking that holds back progress and it's something people have complained about in particular with the C++ standardization process.
You always have these purists who think that because a solution doesn't solve the problem for every single use case, that we can't put forth solutions that solve the problem for 90% of use cases. The entire article that Herb Sutter is writing is really a push to fix the 90% of safety problems in C++ without coming up with an ideologically pure solution that tries to solve all of C++'s safety problems.
If someone puts forth a proposal that a fairly awkward and easily misunderstood and error prone expression like "bool > bool" should produce a compiler error, and your response is that if we do that, we may as well just change all of C++'s syntax so that one could rename rustc to g++ and it just works, then you are participating in bad faith as opposed to presenting a sensible argument that reasonable people can actually discuss and make some kind of meaningful progress.
- saghm 3y ago> If someone puts forth a proposal that a fairly awkward and easily misunderstood and error prone expression like "bool > bool" should produce a compiler error, and your response is that if we do that, we may as well just change all of C++'s syntax so that one could rename rustc to g++ and it just work My first comment gave and example followed by saying "I don't think that's what anyone here is talking about", and my most recent response reiterated that I considered my example as explicitly being outside the boundary of what anyone would consider acceptable. It feels like you're going through great lengths to try to present it as something I actually recommended when I've been quite clear that I don't think it's anywhere close to reasonable. I've been quite clear that I'm not proposing anything; on the contrary, I'm _asking_ about how to decide whether something is a breaking change that's worth it or not because I'm not at all an expert in C++ and I don't pretend to be. The only "ideological thinking that holds back progress" due from "purists" going on here is your insistence that I should be disqualified from asking questions because I happened to try to use a hypothetical example that you didn't like.
- Kranar 3y agoWhy would you go from the proposal in the article that involved making a confusing expression like "bool > bool" a compiler error, to the absurd example of suggesting that C++'s syntax be changed to be identical to Rust? How could talking that way possibly be conducive to having a serious discussion about the article, which is trying to eliminate 90% of the safety issues in C++? If that is the manner in which you think a reasonable discussion can be had on this issue, then no, you are no qualified to discuss it and your participation has done nothing and continues to do nothing but derail the topic which is likely why no one has bothered responding to you.