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0 pointsrepsilat8y ago0 comments

Disclaimer: I don't program in C++ day to day, so maybe my experience is atypical.

Moves and rvalue references (and whatever a PR-value is) and even RVO scare me. They make me want to pass pointers around, because at least I know for sure what'll happen then. (And, funnily enough, C++ seems worse than dynamic languages for this -- more magic around function calls and returns than C or Python or JavaScript.)

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stinos8y ago

scare me ... because at least I know for sure what'll happen then.

Which is just because once you learned how pointers behave. Similarly, if you'd just take the time to learn the basics of rvalues, moving, RVO, ..., you won't be scared by them anymore. Might thake longer than pointers, sure, but it's worth it.

zach438y ago

Maybe this is just my experience, but it took me far longer to understand the subtleties of move semantics, rvalues, and RVO than to understand pointers and references in C++. And this is not even getting into “universal references” (which I don’t have a comfortable understanding of either)

dcuthbertson8y ago

There's a YouTube video [1] of a great talk by Scott Meyers: Effective Modern C++ (part 1). He covers universal references and how they relate to other kinds of references in either that one or Part 2 [2]. I found the videos very helpful.

Edit - I may have the wrong videos linked. It could be his talk on Universal References [3] that I'm thinking of. It's been a while.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhM24zs1MFA

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7qwpuA3EpU

[3] https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Cpp-and-Beyond-20...

banachtarski8y ago

They really aren't that bad... in fact, they're pretty useful. Source: your everyday C++ programmer

stochastic_monk8y ago

They’re great, really. Yes, it takes effort to master, but then you can generate faster, safer, generic code with much less effort.

Source: Another everyday C++ programmer. There are dozens of us. Dozens!

verall8y ago

It's unfortunate when your codebase is C++03 only and intends to remain that way for compatabillity with other vendors. Yay for consumer electronics!

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