Any books or resources for digging deeper in these kinds of topics? I’m a Python developer and would like to learn C++ but the just the reasons you mentioned make it hard to leave Python.
You get a pointer to the start of the range, and you know how large it is, so from there it's just pointer arithmetic and assignment. Easy peasy. Now you just have to make sure that you zero data when you're done with it, track how much of that memory is available or used (and which sections), and (optionally) implement your own defragmentation and garbage collection.
Unless you desperately need to specifically manage the memory layout of your data (e.g. for alignment purposes for massive data processing), none of this is worth the time or trouble to do for most projects, not only because it's a huge amount of work for little gain, but because you'll almost definitely screw it up and potentially corrupt your entire data set.
Note that, at least for the on-disk hashmap set, you absolutely can do this in python, so if you're interested in experimenting with this sort of data management, practice it there first.
A good place to start: https://github.com/luispedro/diskhash
No need for that, as C++ provides placement new().
You'll see a bunch of bytes reflecting how exactly your variable is seen by the CPU. That's exactly how many RAM bytes it occupies. It can quickly copied to a new location, limited only by your RAM bandwidth. It can be dumped to a disk and loaded later, limited only by your disk bandwidth.
Let me warn you right now. It's not worth it. At all. Don't go down this path. Memory management is easy, but that's not the only crap you have to deal with.
Templating and the whole C++ ecosystem with Cmake compiling to make is a giant headache. It takes about a week to integrate a new C++ library in source code and people are worried about installing or "trying" out new libraries because of memory leaks.... while in python I'll install an entire library in seconds just to try out a function.
I would say if you made an app in python and the same exact app in C++, the C++ app would perform waay better. No question. But the developer experience and effort required to make that same app is much much more painful.
If I want a library in python it takes about a second to install with one command, and these libraries tend to be safe so you're not going to get any resistance if you want to try out 10 libraries in the next hour or so, which is sort of impossible with c++. Also these libraries are easily uninstalled and isolated from other python apps you have. No need to use massively complex package managers like nix to handle isolation.
Fuzzing a library just isn't something that's done in python. The developer just installs it and manually tests it 5 or 6 times in a shell and it's part of the ecosystem in 5 minutes.
If you accidentally leave unused libraries in your code and it gets pushed to prod it's a non-issue.
I switched to c++ because I was ok with the verbosity and also the complexity and also dealing with memory. But literally every single corner of the c++ ecosystem is a pain in the ass to work with. It's getting to the point where I'm just annoyed all the time. If you want high performance apps go with rust or golang. C++ is just not worth it.
For a C++ dev moving to python is like night and day. Imagine a programming environment where you only have to deal with the intention of what your app should do and not all the yak shaving that comes with it on the side. I know some and they tell me they would never go back to c++.
You shouldn't use C++ as the backend for your marketing site, or some simple crud backend where a JIT runtime with GC will do.
Hell, if you're even building a small compiler today a JVM language or Go is a better choice.
But if you need to allocate memory yourself, C/C++ is very hard to beat. Games and systems dealing with huge chunks of memory will always go this route... and just (most likely) copy the dependencies into version control and deal with things that way.
It doesn't matter if the majority of applications are web applications. That doesn't make C++ less relevant because that was never the target audience.
For building cloud services where apps are bottlenecked by the database, the user experience is roughly the same as C++ but the developer experience with python is much much much more easier.
This attitude where consumers have to run the apps or install a runtime to run the app on there personal machines is much more rare nowadays.
but... surely you are aware that the memory leak concern absolutely does not disappear ? you just choose to not care about it in the python case for "reasons" - likely you've never been hit by a system which appends to a dynamic array without ever emptying it, and that can happen in every single language in the world.
But if you want a customer to download an app, which is much more rare nowadays than you can do what Eve online does or iron mail. They deliver actual client side python apps. I don't know what they use internally or how they did it, but pyinstaller is one option you can use to build a python executable.