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> Returning regular pointers which point to memory which is not managed by you and that you by default know could disappear at any time is not the C++ way of doing anything. Thing is, a class has a public interface for a reason, and if you as an outsider want to start playing pointer games you know from the start what you are in for.

Maybe not "regular pointers", but returning iterators is very common (all throughout the STL, for one thing.) Those iterators are part of the public interface, and they provide no real guarantees over bare pointers.

I don't have a horse in this race, though. I think the "nicest" solution in abstract is for `tokenize` to be a token-generator* that takes a character generator argument. If you want to store the tokens yourself you can copy them, if you're happy to stream-process them then you can do that, and if you want a reference into the original string storage you can go fly a kite.

*: Where a "token" is probably another character generator.

> All code can be broken if you actively try to, so it makes no sense to protect against everything.

That's not Rust's philosophy. Rust is memory-safe, period.

I guess technically 'if you try to' means also abusing unsafe, so in theory he's still sorta right. Every time I see someone ask a question about transmute on IRC I shiver a little.

But yes, Rust is way, way, way better in this regard.

The difference is safe-by-default languages force you to turn off the safeties before they will let you blow your own foot off. C++ doesn't believe in safeties since (at the time the language was designed) it introduces an unacceptable delay between you wanting to pull the trigger and your target and/or feet blowing up.

> I never implied that pointers are bad, just that this particular usage of pointers is bad, and as such should not be used as an example of why we would want something else over C++. If I ever saw a function with a signature like the one proposed I'd be extremely suspicious of what was going on.

You would. I wouldn't because I don't know any better. How many others are there out there that don't know any better? If you code by yourself, fine, but if you work with a team you are gonna need a higher level of training, so you could teach people like me to catch the problem. Are you always going to be disciplined enough to do code reviews that are in depth enough to capture fishiness in the type signature?

With Rust, if it compiles and passes unit tests, the code review is already 90% done.

Compilation and unit testing will not catch suboptimal expression of logic/thought (which in my experience count for way more than 10% of code reviews).