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Comment by sumanthvepa | Hacker News Reader

I program in C++ and am very happy to do so. Modern C++ is very safe and actually fun to program in. It gives me enormous expressivity, extraordinary performance and safety when I need it. I'm not building space shuttles, I'm building 3D experiences, so I'm not terribly concerned about crashes. But even for me, I've not run into a memory corruption bug in recent memory (10-15 years.)

Bash C/C++ all you want. I'm happy to keep using it to my advantage.

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What is the learning curve for newbies to avoid critical segfaults? If you still have to walk a tightrope to get code across the board, wouldn't all benefit from a plankway with guardrails instead?

I'm not dissing C or C++ in any way. I've used it. But I recognize there are some major footguns that aren't easy to avoid, causing a much longer learning curve than necessary to get things built. Rust at least seems determined to address them, good or bad!

To a first approximation, avoid using raw pointers. They should almost never be needed in application code. Use C++'s standard library facilities for smart pointers and containers instead. They are masterpieces of engineering, and work extremely well.

Why avoid using defaults? That's literally the part of an unnecessarily long learning curve needed to learn C/C++ that rust helps with.

I program in modern C++ as well (C++23). I disagree with both "very safe" and "fun". Even with 23 there are an innumerable number of footguns throughout both the language and the standard library. Debugging code is also a mess. Good luck getting anything done without paying for an IDE, and even then it can be a struggle.

Of all the languages I use C/C++ have the least need for paid tools.

I use emacs(and vim), make and Boost's b2 build system for most of my programming. Although on Windows, Visual Studio is a joy to use. On Linux I use gdb. Works fine. I also use static analysers and valgrind. But I come from a tradition of Unix and living on the command line.

I've tried CLion, because I pay for IntelliJ IDEA for other programming (I also have to write Javascript, and Python) But while its nice, there is nothing there that I couldn't do without.

If you stick to C++ standard libraries, Boost, and turn on all warnings, and are reasonably competent, you won't encounter any bugs that are so serious that your program crashes inexplicably.

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