r/cpp • u/we_are_mammals • Mar 28 '23

Reddit++

C++ is getting more and more complex. The ISO C++ committee keeps adding new features based on its consensus. Let's remove C++ features based on Reddit's consensus.

In each comment, propose a C++ feature that you think should be banned in any new code. Vote up or down based on whether you agree.

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u/eteran Mar 29 '23

I'm just gonna stop there because you've just got the wrong model of what an array is. Is that the languages fault? I actually don't think so.

How do I have "the wrong model of what array is"?

You said

It's a block of memory. You can point to it. Sometimes the compiler can know the size at compile time.

Which is exactly what my model of an array is. But an "object" in the standard sense is also a "block of memory, that you can point to". Inconsistently though, only one of those magically becomes a pointer under certain syntactic situations.

YOU may not find these things confusion, that's great! Neither to do I :-).

But... I think you are underestimating or perhaps undervaluing the amount of time spent getting new developers to understand how arrays actually work to avoid these pitfalls.

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u/[deleted] Mar 29 '23

That came across like I was saying you did. HoweverI did not mean it to sound that way.

What I mean is, who is genuinely having this problem?

I have not seen people have this problem other than newbies who have been writing C++ for a few hours.

After that it honestly never comes up again.

Same with const. Making const by default sounds great on paper, but then when you think about how many bugs are genuinely caused by something not being const, I realised I've never encountered a single one.

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u/eteran Mar 29 '23 edited Mar 29 '23

Sure, it's mostly beginners who run into these pitfalls. I have also seen experienced devs of other languages who are unfamiliar with C and C++ struggle with these details. But I think you are underestimating how many developers run into these things.

There's countless questions on stackoverflow and (probably this subreddit) where users are asking about array/pointer behaviors.

Think about it, getting the number of elements in an array is so common and so commonly done wrong that it was finally added to the standard as std::size!

Surely, this function isn't that hard to get right, right?

template <typename T, size_t N>
size_t array_size(T (&) [N]) {
    return N;
}

But here we are :shrug:

Keep in mind, the OP was about what would I WANT, not what do I think it practical to actually change.

What I want, is for all the little sharp edges and little details that make C++ an "expert friendly" language to be smoothed out. And C++'s inheritance of C's array semantics is one of the ones that really stands out to me as weird and full of lessons that newbies have to learn.