The fact that this headline cannot be distinguished from April Fools joke by other commenters seems to say a lot about the direction in which C++ standard committee is heading.
I finally “got” that this is a joke when they discussed the future alternatives:
> For copyable and assignable references you can use std::reference_wrapper. (http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/utility/functional/referenc...)
and thought, ha ha, an “assignable reference” instead of a “pointer”, that’s obviously completely different. :) What a subtle joke!
Only now I see that reference_wrapper is apparently completely real and exists since C++11. Why does this even exist? My head hurts from banging it against the desk.
That still crazy though :)
The point of c/c++ in comparision to other languages is that you can do anything and having a huge toolbox for that. Pointers are excelent sledgehammer. You can be perfectly fine with not using them but c++ need to have them. The pointers are not source of the problem, the developer is. That's why languages like java are prospering, it prevent incompetent people making stupid mistakes and that is fine. But some people need and want freedom that c++ offers.
You need plenty of tests and valgrind.
Its dangerous for most programmers to be cavalier with owning raw pointers. If we aren't we'll get another Java.
I've been writing software for close on 30 years and I know damn well how easy it is to make mistakes. Even on days when I think I'm in the zone, there will be occasions when I'll go back to it and think "WTF was I thinking?" when it bombs out of the first round of automated testing.
Technically, the only dependencies on pointers are types of the allocation/deallocation functions which are mandated in ISO C++ even for freestanding implementations (not the case in ISO C), and their derivations (new-expressions, etc). All other sane uses of pointers should be replaced by some better alternatives when appropriate (shared_ptr, unique_ptr, observer_ptr, reference, reference_wrapper without type completeness requirement, uintptr_t, iterator, etc).
In that sense every pointer is a badly designed variant type; basically each occurrence of a pointer would likely be mostly incorrect (or not correct enough) in program semantics. I always treat that vagueness as a can of worms, so even merely replacing pointer by observer_ptr somewhere makes a big win to me. There do exist real costs like verbosity and bloating of binary size, but they have to be paid for sin of the father. The ship has sailed too far in a regretful direction; but this is not the excuse to fix it - which is one source of the problem from many developers.
1. Have a container of non-null references. As the example in your cppreference link shows, that’s convenient for efficiently providing multiple “views” of the same values.
2. Pass a value with reference semantics to a function that takes an argument by value. Mainly useful to avoid copying or reuse a function object.
3. Explicitly say “this is a reference to something I don’t own”, complementing unique_ptr’s “reference to something I own exclusively”, shared_ptr’s “reference to something I share ownership of”, and raw pointers’ “reference to something I may or may not own”.
When you use `std::bind` or `std::thread`, the arguments you pass are captured and stored by value. What if you want it to be captured as reference? You use a `std::reference_warpper` instead. Note you cannot use a pointer here because the type won't match, while `reference_wrapper` implicitly converts.
>std::reference_wrapper is a class template that wraps a reference in a copyable, assignable object. It is frequently used as a mechanism to store references inside standard containers (like std::vector) which cannot normally hold references.
>Specifically, std::reference_wrapper is a CopyConstructible and CopyAssignable wrapper around a reference [...] of type T. Instances of std::reference_wrapper are objects (they can be copied or stored in containers) but they are implicitly convertible to T&, so that they can be used as arguments with the functions that take the underlying type by reference.
Sounds pretty reasonable and useful to me. No need for over-the-top head banging :)
FYI, here was one of Chinese translation of the article, but the contents was just deleted 10 minutes ago:
Obviously this one is either believed, or believed to be amusingly subtle. Either way, I agree it should be at least [Joke] flagged.