In Defense of C++

Great article. Modern C++ has come a really long way. I think lots of people have no idea about the newer features of the standard library and how much they minimize footguns.

What’s a good (ie: opinionated) code formatter and unit test framework for C++ these days?

I just had a PR on an old C++ project, and spending 8 years in the web ecosystem have raised the bar around tooling expectations.

Rust is particularly sweet to work with in that regard.

I write C++ daily and I really can't take seriously arguments how C++ is safe if you know what you're doing like come on. Any sufficiently large and complex codebases tend to have bugs and footguns and using tools like memory safe languages limit blast radius considerably.

Smart pointers are neat but they are not a solution for memory safety. Just using standard containers and iterators can lead to lots of footguns, or utils like string_view.

Python’s “there should be one obvious way to do it” slogan often collides with reality these days too, since the language sprawled into multiple idioms just like C++: for printing you can use print("hi"), f-strings like f"hi {x}", .format(), % formatting, or concatenation with +; for loops you can iterate with for i in range(n), list comprehensions [f(i) for i in seq], generator expressions (f(i) for i in seq), or map/filter/lambda; unpacking can be done with a,b=pair, tuple() casting, slicing, *args capture, or dictionary unpacking with *; conditionals can be written with if/else blocks, one-line ternary x if cond else y, and/or short-circuit hacks, or pattern matching match/case; default values can come from dict.get(k,default), x or default, try/except, or setdefault; swapping variables can be done with a,b=b,a, with a temp var, with tuple packing/unpacking, or with simultaneous assignment; joining strings can be done with "".join(list), concatenation in a loop, reduce(operator.add, seq), or f-strings; reading files can be open().read(), iterating line by line with for line in f, using pathlib.Path.read_text(), or with open(...) as f; building lists can be done with append in a loop, comprehensions, list(map(...)), or unpacking with [*a,*b]; dictionaries can be merged with {*a,*b}, a|b (Python 3.9+), dict(a,*b), update(), or comprehensions; equality and membership checks can be ==, is, in, any(...), all(...), or chained comparisons; function arguments can be passed positionally, by name, unpacked with * and \*, or using functools.partial; iteration with indexes can be for i in range(len(seq)), for i,x in enumerate(seq), zip(range(n),seq), or itertools; multiple return values can be tuples, lists, dicts, namedtuples, dataclasses, or objects; even truthiness tests can be if x:, if bool(x):, if len(x):, or if x != []:. Whew!