Herb Sutter on increasing safety in C++
Herb Sutter on increasing safety in C++
Posted Mar 15, 2024 16:59 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)In reply to: Herb Sutter on increasing safety in C++ by farnz
Parent article: Herb Sutter on increasing safety in C++
Pain in the arse, but for anybody who is serious enough to switch on a safety profile, they should be prepared to deal with the fallout. As I've said before, when I inherited a dodgy codebase, I just slowly ratcheted up the warning level, fixing things as they came up, until it got rid of most of the bugs without me ever actually finding half of them ... :-)
Cheers,
Wol
Posted Mar 15, 2024 18:50 UTC (Fri)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
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But the moment you start issuing a diagnostic for C++ features that the profile bans, you've reduced the value of the profile significantly; if you were willing to rewrite the codebase to fix the issues, the cost savings of "rewrite in C++ with safety profile, use a C++ without safety profile compiler for the bits that aren't yet fixed" aren't significant compared to "rewrite in Rust, use cxx.rs to allow you to keep reusing all the C++ code that's not yet rewritten".
If the "safety profile" idea had reached usable status before Rust reached 1.0, then it would have a decent chance; but it's competing against a social reality where the people most willing to change the way they work have moved to Rust over the last 8 and a bit years, and the longer it takes to arrive, the fewer people will be left willing to learn a new language called "C++ with safety profile" but not a new language called "Rust".
Herb Sutter on increasing safety in C++