cppinsights VS GSL

Sorry, I don't know about an Emacs plugin. All the plugins/extensions I'm aware of are listed in the Readme.md: https://github.com/andreasfertig/cppinsights/#c-insights--vi...

I'm happy to add an entry for Emacs once somebody develops a plugin for that editor.

Thank you! This is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for.

I found the source at https://github.com/andreasfertig/cppinsights

You can put it into https://cppinsights.io/ and see the conversions that happen under the hood.

I tried this at https://cppinsights.io/ to see what is generated for something like:

> https://cppinsights.io/ it's a must so you can investigate what gets generated by templates behind the scenes.

> http://eel.is/c++draft/ bookmark this, you will need it!

Now, about books I would suggest the latest "A tour of C++" by Bjarne Stroustrup; it's ideal for experienced programmers that want to learn modern C++ rather fast.

Other books would be Scott Meyers' Effective Series, Andrei Alexandrescu and Herb Sutter are a must, and of course Jason Turner's "C++ Weekly" series [1]; of course apart from the books, the links I have originally shared are more than enough to cover everything around C++.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/lefticus1/videos

https://cppinsights.io/ it's a must so you can investigate what gets generated by templates behind the scenes.

Try https://cppinsights.io. For example, go to https://cppinsights.io/s/8401262a and click the play button at the top left.

If you're doing something more complex, you might need metashell. See http://metashell.org/manual/how_to/index.html#see-what-templ.... But you have to really, deeply, love C++ to get much out of it.

Already showed you how to use ranges and such above, gsl::final_action is here

For span I would recommend the guideline support library - gsl::span

Not sure how things are at this point so you might want to look up with those keywords, but a few years back clang-tidy was one of the suggested tools, or enabling the core guidelines checker in visual studio if you're using that. Maybe using GSL or something similar as well.

When I want safety guarantees, I use the original and run-time checked gsl::span, rather than std::span. https://github.com/microsoft/GSL .

Another solution: use std::span (or some alternative implementations if the codebase doesn't use C++20).

If you ask me, the GSL [1] alone is a fairly radical departure from C++ that delivers a lot of safety. I don't know if it's gotten much popularity, though. Probably because it introduces a similar disruption like you might find from a brand new programming language.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/GSL

> With Rust, though, one needs to learn entirely new ideas — things like lifetimes, ownership, and the borrow checker. These are not familiar concepts to most people working in other common languages ... Some of those “new” ideas are, of course, present in other languages — especially functional ones.

With C++, lifetime and ownership are just about as important but unfortunately no one's got your back. You can ignore lifetimes and ownership but you do so at your own peril. And the compiler won't tell you you're doing it wrong because the language wasn't designed for it to do so.

If you want a taste of rust's "mindset" (with respect to limitations imposed by some types) without jumping ship to a new language, try C++'s Guidelines Support Library [1]. It introduces some of the same benefits/friction as switching to rust but without a new language. Opting-in to some of these guidelines might be a gentler way to get some of the benefits of Rust. But it comes with a similarly higher bar.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/GSL

It's also far more verbose than T* or T& (probably intentionally). If you really want a non-nullable pointer, gsl::not_null from the GSL is a good option. Writing your own version is also trivial, if you don't want to add a dependency.

I instead use the GSL and the Core Guidelines, where