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Comment Re:Do it yourself (Score 3, Interesting) 82

So don't use STL

Indeed, No True Scotsman would use STL with C++.

clang-tidy and Cppcheck and flaw finder and Sonarqube

The last job I had where I had to use C/C++, we automatically ran an expensive static analysis tool every time we checked in code. I'd estimate that it only found about half of the potential segfaults, and it made up for that by finding twice as many false positives.

Comment Re:Do it yourself (Score 3, Insightful) 82

The "rules" of mutable collections in STL state that collections may not be mutated while being iterated.

Nope. If I had used st::list instead of std::vector, it would have been perfectly fine and officially supported. (Assuming I changed "i+10" to "i+11" in order to make the algorithm actually terminate, although that change wouldn't affect the vector crash.).

The problem is that there are dozens of different rules you have to remember to apply to the different types of lists and iterators. And that's only talking about that one topic. There are hundreds of other rules covering a multitude of language aspects that you have to mentally apply against every single line of code you write, many of which can potentially cause memory corruption.

Comment Re:Do it yourself (Score 4, Interesting) 82

You don't need the language to enforce memory safety to program memory-safe. The most important thing is, for example, to never touch raw pointers. C++ makes it very easy to avoid this. Rust forces you to avoid it, but just because C++ gives you the loaded gun, it doesn't mean you have to use it. In particular not on your own foot.

That is a dangerous misconception. You don't need to use any pointers to get memory errors in C++:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <vector>
 
int main() {
    std::vector<int> v = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9};
    for (auto i : v) {
        if (i % 2 == 0) {
            v.push_back(i + 10);
        }
        printf("%d\n", i);
    }
 
    return 0;
}
 
$ g++ -Wall -pedantic t.cpp
$ echo $?
0
$ ./a.out
 
1
2
-947527061
1600570778
5
6
7
8
9

Comment Re:There is already a safe subset of C++ (Score 4, Insightful) 82

languages like Rust exist to put ignorant programmers in straight jackets for their own good

Are you seriously trying to suggest that never allocating memory is not also a "straight jacket"?

You seem to be saying that a currently existing bowdlerized version C++ is safe for close-world problems. Possibly so, but that still leaves C++ unsuitable for open-world problems. That makes C++ only suitable for niche applications. Why learn it?

If you just use Rust or any other memory safe language, you won't have to worry about what kind of "world" you're writing for, or about choosing from a range of increasingly dangerous "profiles".

Comment Re: U S E N E T ?? (Score 1) 111

Agreed. ISPs did not want to feed Goggle any content. Perhaps also why they dropped their personal website hosting. An oligopolist cannot help their competitors lest they bash them with it. (Chuck Prince gotta dance.)

Big Brother FCC is likely too stupid, but both of these moves corral the net somewhat (pops elsewhere).

Comment Re:Transitions (Score 2) 243

Someone didn't live through the loss of the floppy drive, DB9 ports, and parallel ports.

In my day, to plug in a mouse: We took the box apart, installed a proprietary bus card, and then tried to figure out non-conflicting spots for the I/O and IRQ jumpers. Then we typed a bunch of gibberish into AUTOEXEC.BAT. And we liked it!

Comment U S E N E T ?? (Score 1) 111

USENET aka NetNews was the immediate discussion predecessor of social media (amongst which I count /. as one of the first and lasting). If you want to know whether and how social media is fading, look at it.

AFAICS, USENET has distributed costs and no revenue model. Social Media has serious centralized server costs by like print, but can charge for [much] advertising and some subscription. USENET died when ISPs noticed few users actually used it, so little customer value. Significant costs, running a newsspool is as hard as running a mailserver.

Social media will not die until the traffic [revenue] does, albeit there may be some rotation like MySpace giving way to FaceBook.

Comment Re:A little more honesty please (Score 1) 22

At least Nixon had the class not to force his minions to take all of the credit for the Apollo missions in their press releases.

That's what Trump did here: Same as usual he took all of the credit for other peoples' work.

You wonder why he gets under peoples' skin? It's because essentially everything he does is some kind of asshole move like this.

Comment Part of the reason... (Score 1) 35

is that facebook, google, etc.... all the monopoly players keep buying their potential competition before they get too big.

Consolidation has played a large part in this since it's a guaranteed payout rather than having to gamble with trying to defeat the dominate powers.

A lot of the recent AI purchases are this pattern. In the early 2000s or in dotcom days they might have IPOed.

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