I concur. I don't expect that to convince anybody, but a post needs an opening, and this is as good as any.
Regarding unique_ptr and move semantics, I used both quite a lot on a recent project (VC++/clang/gcc) and have been pretty pleased with the results.
It can be quite hard to make things copyable sometimes, but it's usually easy to make everything at least moveable, so where in the past you might have had to use a pointer (leaving room for error) or a smart pointer (more coding, slow debug build, annoying in the debugger), you can now just always have a value.
And unique_ptr is good for documenting ownership; I used it for stuff that gets passed between threads, but of course there are other options. You don't get any useful compile-time checking, but if you get things wrong then it does at least go pop at runtime in an obvious way... which is better than nothing. (As the saying goes, C programmers know the value of nothing! And that's why we appreciate it so much when we get anything better.)
My two takeaways from the experience:
- moving as a language feature is far more useful than copying... I suspect (though without having thought through it especially thoroughly) C++ would have been heaps better if it started out with move semantics only, with copying being only by convention
Regarding unique_ptr and move semantics, I used both quite a lot on a recent project (VC++/clang/gcc) and have been pretty pleased with the results.
It can be quite hard to make things copyable sometimes, but it's usually easy to make everything at least moveable, so where in the past you might have had to use a pointer (leaving room for error) or a smart pointer (more coding, slow debug build, annoying in the debugger), you can now just always have a value.
And unique_ptr is good for documenting ownership; I used it for stuff that gets passed between threads, but of course there are other options. You don't get any useful compile-time checking, but if you get things wrong then it does at least go pop at runtime in an obvious way... which is better than nothing. (As the saying goes, C programmers know the value of nothing! And that's why we appreciate it so much when we get anything better.)
My two takeaways from the experience:
- moving as a language feature is far more useful than copying... I suspect (though without having thought through it especially thoroughly) C++ would have been heaps better if it started out with move semantics only, with copying being only by convention
- Rust has moved further up my todo list