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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  2d ago (text post)   451 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for November 19, 2024

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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I'd have imagined a C# fan would have been most annoyed by having to manually manage heap allocations, with no garbage collection.

Modern C++ is much less painful in this regard. The days of new() and delete() are long gone.

find /usr/include/c++/14/ -type f | xargs grep '= new' still shows me nearly a hundred uses in standard library headers, so "long gone" is a bit of an exaggeration. If libstdc++ authors are still at that point, imagine where your average coworkers are. ;-)

I admit that shared_ptr was nice, and the development of "like auto_ptr, but you can put it in containers" was a godsend. Pointing grep at my own favorite project I still see 6 invocations of new in non-deprecated code, versus about 800 invocations of make_unique.

But I'd still argue that even modern unique_ptr best-practices count as manual management and are thus more annoying than "the programming language will just figure it out". Even if you try to mimic garbage collection behavior with shared_ptr you still have to worry about leaking unreachable cycles of pointers that a garbage collector would have been able to detect. This is all a useful sort of annoying if you write any sort of interactive code where big a garbage collection sweep might drop a frame or add input latency or whatever, and even garbage collected code can leak memory because "I forgot to remove a reference" isn't a drastically different bug from "I forgot to delete an allocation", but heap management is still the thing I notice the most complaints about when users of other languages first move to C++.

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