Comment by Perseids
12 years ago
RAII is a minimum. You also have to treat any direct and indirect (unchecked) pointer arithmetic as a potential security vulnerability though. For example if you use the [] operator of a vector you can still access memory outside of the allocated space. Instead you would have to use the at() method which actually checks the bounds. Even iterator are problematic as the iterator on a vector also ignores the actual bounds iirc (though with most idioms the comparison against the end iterator is pretty error proof). This lends itself to constructs where you do not work with any indexes at all in the way foreach loops abstract your position in a container away.
Ah I tend to not use [] operators on vectors etc. but as you say iterators can be problematic. The best way is to start at the end of the container and work backwards, particularly if you are removing items from the list (thereby wrecking the iterator's idea of the end position if you were moving forwards through it).
I should probably finish Bjarne's C++11 book - I am maintaining a codebase of old style C++ and seem to be stuck in the old methods of doing it, mainly because of using compilers that don't have C++11 support.
Is there any recommended reading on new style C++ other than Bjarne's book?