“Mozilla could have achieved 90% of what it wanted from a rust rewrite with a modern C++11 rewrite at a quarter of the cost.” #shithnsays
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My view is: Shared_ptr can help with trivial refcount misuse, but that isn’t where most of the problems are. Bounds checking is helpful, but the syntactic sugar runs the wrong way ([] is unchecked). Worst: UAF is pernicious and there is very little modern C++ does to prevent it.
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Many modern C++ constructs encourage and mask use-after-free. Using destructors for managing all resources while still using references, iterators, etc. makes that worse, not better. Features like string_view are going to amplify that even further. It mostly helps avoid leaks...
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Destructors are great in a type / memory safe language, but it's even easier to create dangling references when destruction is implicit rather than explicit. I've spent a lot of time debugging these memory corruption bugs and it's so much worse to resolve with C++ than C.
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Especially if you aren't familiar with the layers and layers of template-based abstractions used in that project and it's not clear what's happening from the stack trace / debugging. The language cannot make safe abstractions yet people use tons of abstraction which is an issue.