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Comment by ofrzeta

6 hours ago

"I had heard the rumors that C++ was a scary language filled with footguns and segmentation faults, but I had never given it a fair chance myself" - props for this. There's too much hearsay in software engineering.

And then immediately afterwards we see const T* in a supposedly immutable data structure meaning the pointer remains mutable. Yet another classic footgun.

  • It looked to me like most of the raw pointers in the blog were const. Sometimes you don't want the baggage of smart pointers and getting a cheap easily copyable view of your data is nice, so you want to return a const T. Usually if an API returns a const T I assume lifetimes are handled for me and that the ptr is valid as long as it is not nullptr.