Comment by mgaunard
3 days ago
Wrapping every pointer in a smart pointer is very bad style; that suggests you simply have the bad level of abstraction in your code.
That problem seems even more prevalent in Rust, where I see Arc used everywhere, presumably as a cop-out not to have to figure out how to satisfy the borrow checker in smarter ways.
C++ doesn't have a smart ponter for 'i will not need this for longer than something else' - shared pointer gets the overhead of reference counting. Rust makes borrows easy - taking and returning a unique_ptr is conceptually the same thing but the syntax makes it tedious. Borrows don't cover the case of I'll store it but whole program analisys would show I won't store it as long as the owner (i'm not a rust expert but I think my understanding is right here)
both languages don't have a good way to handle circular references should you need them (again my rust isn't strong but I think that is right). You are correct to say avoid that - but sometimes you need them.
It does, it's called a pointer. You're literally not allowed to dereference a pointer once the pointee has ceased to exist, so by using them you're making the promise you'll ensure this is satisfied.
C++ is not limited to unique_ptr, the language (unlike Rust) allows you to define your own semantics of what a value is. You can then work in terms of copying or moving values, which makes lifetime management trivial as they are scope-bound.
Smart is the key. You can use a raw pointer, but that doesn't tell or enforce anything about lifetime. How long will that pointer be valid - can I save it to a class member - we don't know.
C++ gives you more more things, but none of them are enforced. (I'm sure Rust wants those same things at time - but since I'm not aware of anyone with any ideas how to enforce them so Rust has decided to not allow those - a reasonable choice overall, but sometimes annoying when it means you can't do something that you "know" is correct just because it can't be proved correct in the language)
2 replies →