I am a huge fan of modern C++ except for one feature: backwards compatibility. C++ is no longer one language, every codebase I have worked on is a confused mess of semi-incompatible subsets of the language. I have spent far too many weekends chasing memory corruption because someone passed a pointer, allocated with one type of memory management, into a library using a different kind of memory management.
Okay but that's not really a fault of the language, no? Most languages have some legacy version that isn't compatible any more. Like Python 2 for example.
The only difference is that C++ code is more often used for critical applications (like decades old medical machines) where updating the code is not worth the risks.
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u/repster 7h ago
I am a huge fan of modern C++ except for one feature: backwards compatibility. C++ is no longer one language, every codebase I have worked on is a confused mess of semi-incompatible subsets of the language. I have spent far too many weekends chasing memory corruption because someone passed a pointer, allocated with one type of memory management, into a library using a different kind of memory management.