Comment by arinlen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arinlen | Hacker News Reader

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> The trouble with "Modern C++" is that nothing gets deleted from "Classic C++".

This is not exactly true. For example, with the introduction of smart pointers, manual memory management is kicked out of C++'s happy path. This makes code far simpler to reason about and safer. Sure, you can still use new and delete, but since C++11 you better have a very good reason to use those.

Nevertheless, it doesn't make sense to complain about not deleting stuff from C++ when a) until recently C++ was repeatedly criticized for having an extremely spartan standard library, b) since C++98 basic features were added to C++ such as support for parallel and concurrent programming, c) there is no feature that gathers anything resembling a consensus on beig worth taking out of the standard.

I'd add that pseudo-standard libraries for C++, such as Boost and POCO, have been popping up and growing in both scope and adoption. This reflects a clear need felt by the C++ community to increase the scope of it's standard components.

Outside of the happy path doesn't mean, inaccessible or uncommonly used. C++ is on track to be a composition of ten languages by 2030. I'm not against that in general, it's kind of liberating, but at some point in time I hope someone does decide to do some house keeping.

There are too many APIs that still want raw pointers.

> There are too many APIs that still want raw pointers.

Irrelevant. C++'s smart pointers deal with ownership and life cycle management. You can still pass raw pointers to objects managed by a smart pointers.

The only exception is when you're dealing with a framework which already handles life cycle management, such as Qt. Nevertheless, even Qt offers its own smart pointers suite.

> You can still pass raw pointers to objects managed by a smart pointers.

Not if the API is taking ownership and you want your program to be correct. This happens far more often than dealing with something like Qt.

If the API takes ownership, can't you just release the smart pointer, effectively forgetting about it and letting the new owner deal with it? Maybe I'm missing somethign.

That means it is no longer managed by a smart pointer and you need to understand the nature of the API. I understood the above comment to mean that you can just solve problems by calling "get" and moving on with your life.

Even if they want to take ownership, smart pointers allow the semantics to be expressed clearly and in a safe manner.

There's nothing wrong with using a raw pointer as an argument of a function. In this context this is usually equivalent to using a reference. What is wrong, in fact, is passing, instead, a unique pointer (by reference, necessarily) or, even worse, a shared pointer (by value) when there is no need for sharing.

> In this context this is usually equivalent to using a reference.

Not really. The very, very, very important difference is that the pointer can be null, signalling "no object". For some purposes, this is a critically important difference; in other cases, you should be passing a reference.

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