Comment by tsimionescu
6 months ago
This whole concept that code should be architected as "libraries" and "userspace" is such a C++ism.
It's a really weird concept that probably comes only from having this extremely complex language where even the designers expect some parts of it are too weird for "normal programmers". But then they imagine some advanced class of programmer, the "library programmers", who can deal with such complexity.
The more modern way of designing software is to stick to the YAGNI principle: design your code to be simple and straightforward, and only extract out datastructures into separate libraries if and when they prove to be needed.
Not to mention, the position that shared ownership should just not exist at all is self-evidently absurd. The lifetime of an object can very well be a dynamic property of your program, and a concurrent one. A language that lacks std::shared_ptr / Arc is simply not a complete language, there will be algorithms that you just can't express.
So you strongly believe that the programmer should implement .map on arrays and hashmaps etc themselves? Well you will love C code then.
The point of library code is to implement these things once in a safe and efficient manner and reuse the implementation.
Sometimes there are more domain or even company specific things that should be implemented exactly once and reused.
Nobody said there are different tiers of developers like "library developers" and "normal developers". Those are different types of programming that a single developer can do but fundamentally require a different thought pattern. Designing datastructures and algorithms are a lot more CS whereas general programming is much more akin to plumbing. If you think library code isn't needed it's because you overlook the library code you already use.
There are some things that are not yagni, if you have those in place then the rest of your code can literally be implemented that way because you literally won't need it.
It's not that shared_ptr isn't needed, it's that people don't use it where necessary, they use it because it's convenient not to think entirely and because the necessary Library code isn't there. I stand strong that seeing std::shared_ptr/box (or even std::unique_ptr/Box) in general code is a code smell, the fact that you even said that there are certain algorithm's that cannot be expressed without it means you agree, the algorithm should be implemented exactly once and reused. If it's only used one then sure it can be abstracted when needed but that doesn't mean you shouldn't need to justify why it's there.