> C++ getting serious about safety. Buffer overflows and bad pointers should have been eliminated decades ago. We've known how for a long time.
Would love some links to read over weekend. Thanks!
Would love some links to read over weekend. Thanks!
- std::string_view
- std::span
- std::unique_ptr
- std::shared_ptr
- std::weak_ptr (non owning reference to shared_ptr, knows when the parent is free'd)
- ranges
- move semantics
- move capture in lambdas
- std::variant
- std::optional
To be honest, learning rust has made me a better c++ programmer as well. Having to really think about lifetimes and ownership from an API perspective has been really neat. It's not so much that I wasn't concerned about it before, more that I strive to be more expressive of these conditions in code.
"string_view" is a borrow of a slice of a string. Since C++ doesn't have a borrow checker, it's possible to have a dangling string_view if the string_view outlives the underlying string. This is a memory safety error.
Rust has educated people to recognize this situation. Now it's standard terminology to refer to this as a borrow, which helps. Attempting to retrofit Rust concepts to C++ is helping, but often they're cosmetic, because they say the right thing, but aren't checked. However, saying the right thing makes it possible to do more and more static checking.
Sure C++ doesnt have a borrow checker but these types encourage the idea of "reifying" lack of ownership rather than keeping it ad hoc
Unfortunately there is no string view, so you need to copy the substrings or use pointers/indices. I tried to build a string view, but the freepascal compiler is not smart enough to keep a struct of 2 elements in registers.
Lifetime management has always been there for any developer dealing with resources in any language. Over the years, languages and specialized extensions and tools have offered different solutions to help with that problem.
What Rust has brought is a system that checks explicit tracking embedded into a mainstream language.
However I feel like most of the heavy lifting features came with C++11. Span, optional, variant and string_view are nice additions to the toolkit but more as enhancements rather than the paradigm shift of C++11 (move, unique_ptr, lambdas et-al).
It's funny, because while it's certainly become more influential lately, that subculture existed as a niche in the C++ world before Rust and before C++11. So much so that when I first heard about Rust I thought "these are C++ people."