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White House: Future Software Should Be Memory Safe (www.whitehouse.gov)

submitted 8 months ago by crimsonpoodle@pawb.social to c/programming@programming.dev

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On the one side I really like c and c++ because they’re fun and have great performance; they don’t feel like your fighting the language and let me feel sort of creative in the way I do things(compared with something like Rust or Swift).

On the other hand, when weighing one’s feelings against the common good, I guess it’s not really a contest. Plus I suspect a lot of my annoyance with languages like rust stems from not being as familiar with the paradigm. What do you all think?

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[–] abhibeckert@lemmy.world 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Pointers suck in C++. In other languages every single variable is a pointer and it works perfectly with no memory bugs and great performance.

Pass by value often uses too much memory. Especially if you have a bunch of simultaneous functions/threads/etc that all need to access the same value at once. You can get away with it when your memory is a few dozen integers, but when you're working with gigabytes of media... you need pointers. Some of the code I work with has values so large they don't even fit in RAM at all, let alone two or three copies of them. Pass by value could mean writing a hundred gigabytes to swap.

[–] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

That's one reason I mentioned pass by reference "smart" languages will do it automatically depending on the size of the argument, some languages (including my beloved PHP) even have a copy-on-edit functionality where everything is technically passed as a mutable reference but as soon as you mutate it (unless it was explicitly marked as a mutable reference) it will copy the original object and have you edit the copy instead of the original.

Is being explicit about when copies happen almost always a good thing - yea the overhead of that system is undesirable in performance sensitive situations - but for a high level scripting language it's quite nice.

[–] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

The way PHP does it is oddly smart