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Comment by shmolyneaux | Hacker News Reader

I think more people need to see this. This is how the creator of C++ thinks we should be writing code. This is what he thinks code should look like. To split a string by whitespace we should use `while (cin >> s)`. We should have a `typedef` in the middle of functions. Iterations should use `.begin()` and `.end()` everywhere. There might even be a bug with a trailing "+" appearing in the output?

Imagine if this was a new language that the dev community was seeing for the first time. It's hard to imagine it gaining much traction.

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If you want a laugh, Google a tutorial for how to read a file. You should also know that all the tutorials are wrong, because they fail to handle at least one footgun or another.

There is no “modern” alternative. If you read Reddit threads, C++ programmers actually believe that it’s a reasonable file reading API.

Most companies that I’ve worked at have just implemented our own on top of the OS syscalls. Which is annoying because it requires at least a Windows and UNIX variant.

Look, I like C++. I’ve been programming in it for years. But some of the stereotypes around C++ programmers are true. I still occasionally run into design decisions so untethered from reality that it still shocks me after all these years.

C++ has a filesystem API? TIL, never used it.

filesystem api was introduced in C++17

QFile is mostly fine (it's probably not the fastest, but not slow), and QString is pretty comfy for all kinds of string manipulation :)

The FAQ was mostly written before C++11 with some updates since then. I don't think he is rewriting every code snippet to match modern styles. It is an enormous FAQ and not meant as an introduction to the language.

> Imagine if this was a new language that the dev community was seeing for the first time. It's hard to imagine it gaining much traction.

But it's not a new language. It's backwards compatible with C.

So "iterators" behave the same as pointers, since that's how you'd iterate through an array. You can add and subtract, then pass them to other functions.

You can't just have a function that returns a vector of strings, because that function would do an allocation. When is it deallocated? Before unique_ptr (the guide was written before), it'd be the caller's responsibility to manually do so.

Meaning you have to assign the output of that function to a variable every single time and manually remember to deallocated it or you get a memory leak.

C avoids this with `strtok` by destructively modifying the string in place. This is arguably worse.

If you were designing a new, non-GC, language, you'd have good ownership semantics and not allow pointer arithmetic. That'd be Rust.

D doesn't allow pointer arithmetic in @safe code. At first it seems like that cannot work, but it works very well. Pointer arithmetic is relegated to functions that are @system.

The reason it works is because D has actual array types.

If you choose to use automatic memory management with D, you are memory safe.

I'm referring to C heavily using pointer arithmetic.

If you wanted to make it easier to convert arbitrary functions to use your shiny new resizable type, you end up with something simulator to iterators.

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