Five Popular Myths about C++: Postscript

Re:Five Popular Myths about C++: Postscript by dragontamer on Tuesday December 30, 2014 @02:54PM (#8816359)

shared_ptr<int> a = make_shared<int>(10);

What's so hard about managing that? shared_ptr is basically equivalent to Python garbage collection.

Shared_ptr were standardized in 2003, and Microsoft implemented CComPtr<> way back in the 90s for this easy to use reference-counted smart-pointer concept.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa266806%28v=vs.60%2...

So... yeah. Stop doing manual memory management in C++. Something better has existed... since the 90s.

So how about you criticize something in C++ that wasn't solved at least 16 years ago?

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Re:Five Popular Myths about C++: Postscript by StephanTLavavej on Tuesday December 30, 2014 @03:52PM (#8816675)

Correction: shared_ptr wasn't in C++98/03. It was originally developed in Boost, then added to TR1 (in 2005), and finally incorporated into C++11.

One of the major differences between shared_ptr and CComPtr is that shared_ptr is non-intrusive - it can manage anything, even things like ints that don't know anything about strong/weak refcounts.

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Re:Five Popular Myths about C++: Postscript by dragontamer on Tuesday December 30, 2014 @06:21PM (#8817330)

My history was off, thanks for the clarification.

Nonetheless, the concepts revolving around CComPtr and all that good stuff can be easily seen in C++98 / STL. STL Strings for instance automatically clean themselves up under the principles of RAII.

Auto_ptr<>, the first smart pointer, also was standardized in C++98. While crude and primitive by today's standards (especially compared to unique_ptr<>'s explicit RValue semantics), auto_ptr<> shows me that even in the mid 90s, people understood the principles of RAII.

At least, if you were a learned C++ programmer.

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