dmd VS CppCoreGuidelines

>For me the biggest gap in programming languages is a rust like language with a garbage collector, instead of a borrow checker.

I cannot agree more that's the much needed sweet spot/Goldilock/etc. Personally I have been advocating this approach for some times. Apparently the language is already widely available and currently has stable and wide compiler support including the venerable GNU compiler suite (GDC). It also one of the fastest, if not the fastest programming in existence for both compilation and execution [1].

It has been beating Fortran in its number crunching territory, no small feat given the Fortran pedigree with many languages still depending on Fortran based infrastructure for their number crunching capabilities including Matlab, Julia, Rust, Go, C, C++, etc.

[1] D website:

https://dlang.org/

[2] Numeric age for D: Mir GLAS is faster than OpenBLAS and Eigen:

http://blog.mir.dlang.io/glas/benchmark/openblas/2016/09/23/...

> you've written an an ARM disassembler

Here's my AArch64 disassembler work in progress:

https://github.com/dlang/dmd/blob/master/compiler/src/dmd/ba...

I add to it in tandem with writing the code generator. It helps flush out bugs in both by doing this. I.e. generate the instruction, the disassemble it and compare with what I thought it should be.

It's quite a bit more complicated than the corresponding x86 disassembler:

https://github.com/dlang/dmd/blob/master/compiler/src/dmd/ba...

Here's the pipeline spitting out the same error as on my macbook did.

https://github.com/dlang/dmd/actions/runs/8023469412/job/219...

"C++ Core Guidelines" by Bjarne Stroustrup and Herb Sutter Read the guidelines

I've found both explicit future/promise management and coroutines difficult (even irritating) to reason about. Co-routines look simpler at the surface (than explicit future chaining), and so their the syntax is less atrocious, but there are nasty traps. For example:

https://isocpp.github.io/CppCoreGuidelines/CppCoreGuidelines...

I liked "Effective Modern C++" although that is a little bit out of date by now. Stroustrup's recent article "21st century C++" https://cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/21st-century-c/ . There are also the C++ core guidelines though maybe those are also out of date? https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines

I've been looking at Rust and it's an improvement over C, but it still strikes me as a work in progress, and its attitude is less paranoid than that of Ada. I'd at least like to see options to crank up the paranoia level. Maybe Ada itself will keep adapting too. Ada is clunky, but it is way more mature than Rust.

I haven't read much from Bjarne but this is refreshingly self-aware and paints a hopeful path to standardize around "the good parts" of C++.

As a C++ newbie I just don't understand the recommended path I'm supposed to follow, though. It seems to be a mix of "a book of guidelines" and "a package that shows you how you should be using those guidelines via implementation of their principles".

After some digging it looks like the guidebook is the "C++ Core Guidelines":

https://isocpp.github.io/CppCoreGuidelines/CppCoreGuidelines

And that I should read it and then:

> use parts of the standard library and add a tiny library to make use of the guidelines convenient and efficient (the Guidelines Support Library, GSL).

Which seems to be this (at least Microsoft's implementation):

https://github.com/microsoft/GSL

And I'm left wondering, is this just how C++ is? Can't the language provide tooling for me to better adhere to its guidelines, bake in "blessed" features and deprecate what Bjarne calls, "the use of low-level, inefficient, and error-prone features"?

See this: https://isocpp.github.io/CppCoreGuidelines/CppCoreGuidelines...

Technically, headers are just copy-paste, obviously. However, there's value to keeping them as standalone as possible.

> close a file (which ironically is the poster child for RAII)

Yes, I call this "RAII is a lie" (T-shirt pending).

Closing file descriptors is univerally used to showcase RAII, but it should never be used for that.

C++ has the same problem:

https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/issues/2203

In there, it is acknowledged that a manual Close() should always be provided, and used if you want guarantees.

> is a bad pattern

Good that Rust at least figured it out early that it's a bad pattern!

Never use RAII in situations where the cleanup can fail!

The standard library types are guaranteed to be in a useful state after being moved from (the term "valid state" is used for this). Of course, that doesn't mean that your own types have to, but the C++ Core Guidelines suggest doing so [1].

1: https://isocpp.github.io/CppCoreGuidelines/CppCoreGuidelines...

It’s in the cpp core guidelines: https://isocpp.github.io/CppCoreGuidelines/CppCoreGuidelines...

std::reference_wrapper still can’t save you from yourself, but its slightly better.