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Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

And yet, I interviewed 10 people easily where I was using new and delete in the example code and only one person asked "hey - can we use unique_ptr?".

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Ownership problems with pointer/references don't end with allocation.

A codebase can use only std::make_unique() to allocate heap, and still pass around raw pointers to that memory (std::unique_ptr::get()).

The real problem is data model relying on manual lifetime synchronization, e.g. pass raw pointer to my unique_ptr to another thread, because this thread joins that thread before existing and killing the unique_ptr.

I don’t disagree. That’s why I don’t write C++ anymore. It’s a masochistic language and trying to do it in a team environment with people who do understand how to do it properly is a mess let alone adding in people who don’t know.

Well in interviews this is tricky. Sometimes the interviewer wants to see I can new/delete properly, sometimes this tells me "well, if that's the style they are using I better go elsewhere"

If it's done as part of a "here is legacy code, suggest ways to improve it" question one should point it out, though.

Don’t worry. The question was super basic and almost every candidate still failed to mention that you need to delete in the destructor, that copying requires a new allocation or that you also need to define the move constructor. It made me sad about the state of C++ developers and thankful that Rust makes such mistakes impossible.

many schools (like mine) don't teach unique pointers in the pure "programming" class sequence, but offer a primer in advanced classes where c++ happens to be used, with the intent to teach manual memory management for a clearer transition to e.g. upper-levels which use c.

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