Comment by VorpalWay
7 hours ago
Existing APIs for file IO in STL don't return string views into the file buffer of the library (when using buffered IO). That is something you could do, as an example.
Optional being opinionated I don't think I agree with. It is better to have an optional of something that can't be null (such as a reference) than have everything be implicitly nullable (such as raw pointers). This means you have to care about the nullable case when it can happen, and only when it can happen.
There is a caveat for C++ though: optional<T&> is larger in memory than a rae pointer. Rust optimises this case to be the same size (one pointer) by noting that the zero value can never be valid, so it is a "niche" that can be used for something else, such as the None variant of the Option. Such niche optimisation applies widely across the language, to user defined types as well. That would be impossible tp retrofit on C++ without at the very least breaking ABI, and probably impossible even on a language level. Maybe it could be done on a type by type basis with an attribute to opt in.
I work on a codebase which is heavily influenced by the same sentiment you share wrt optional and I can tell you it's a nightmare. Has the number of bugs somehow magically decreased? No, it did not, as a matter of fact the complexity that it introduces, which is to be honest coupled along with the monadic programming patterns which are normally enforced within such environments, just made it more probable to introduce buggy code at no obvious advantage but at the great cost - ergonomics, reasoning about the code, and performance. So, yeah, I will keep the position that it is heavily opinionated and not solving any real problem until I see otherwise - the evidence in really complex C++ production code. I have worked with many traditional C and C++ codebases so that is my baseline here. I prefer working with latter.
Niche optimizations are trivial to automate in modern C++ if you wish. Many code bases automagically generate them.
The caveat is that niche optimizations are not perfectly portable, they can have edge cases. Strict portability is likely why the C++ standard makes niche optimization optional.