Comment by chuckadams
2 months ago
Apologies, I was referring to a "Rule of 7", but I more or less hallucinated it, since I'd heard the old "rule of 3" then "rule of 5" had been revised again, and thought they were maybe going with prime numbers?
https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/rule_of_three.htm...
The confusion kind of speaks for itself. The language is a construction set where the primary building block is razor blades.
It's important to notice that you can keep well out of trouble by sticking to the rule of _zero_, i.e. relying on the defaults for copy&move ctors, assignment operators and destructor.
So, the best advice is: Don't mess with the razor blades. And these days, C++ gives you enough in the standard library to avoid messing with them yourself. But since this is C++, you _can_ always open up the safety casing and messing with things, if you really want to.
I'll admit, the Rule of Zero is the kind of thing I've been wanting all along, but so much code out there seems obsessed with micro-managing its pointer and reference semantics, and one still learns of their mistakes through segmentation faults and linker errors, at least in those codebases.
Also, an artist friend tells me you can make some pretty keen sculpture with razor blades and a spot welder. Still recommended to use pliers and gloves tho.
Ten years ago I gave a C++ conference talk titled "The Rule of Seven (Plus or Minus Two)" — a reference to the "magic number seven" meme
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus...
and alluding to the fact that besides the well-established "Rule of 5" (copy construction and assignment, move construction and assignment, and destruction) a C++ class author also needs to at least think about whether to provide: default constructor, ADL swap, equality comparison operator, and/or specialized std::hash. And maybe a few more I'm forgetting right now.
In hindsight (without rewatching it right now) I remember my thesis in that talk as erring too much on the side of "isn't this confusing? how exciting! be worried about the state of things!" These days I'd try harder to convey "it's not really that hard; yes there are a lot of customization knobs, but boring rules of thumb generally suffice; newbies shouldn't actually lose sleep over this stuff; just remember these simple guidelines."
I remeber that while learning Rust and writing fairly complex programs I had so many times when compiler was in my way, but once I finally figured out how to satisfy it, I saw that if I was writing in C++ I would just shoot myself in the foot in subtle hard to debug ways if I did what I tried to do and C++ compiler would happily let me.