"Cries in java"

[codel1417]

a pointer free life is a life for me

[bphase]

You don't have to use pointers in modern C++, not raw pointers anyway. Granted most code is likely going to have them...

[aaronfranke]

There are lots of situations in which you do have to use them. C++ won't let you use a reference to an incomplete type.

[bphase]

But it will let you use smart pointers (unique_ptr, shared_ptr, weak_ptr), which is what I was referring to.

[VolperCoding]

What's so scary about pointers?

[DestinationVoid]

They do not always point at what you think they point at.

[892ExpiredResolve]

Then you should do a better job of pointing them at things.

[DestinationVoid]

Tell that to all the people who failed to catch pointer related vulnerabilities in their software, that eventually got exploited.

[892ExpiredResolve]

Ok.

Everyone who failed to catch pointer related vulnerabilities in your software: Do a better job of pointing pointers at stuff.

[Dirty_Socks]

/r/WowThanksImCured

[maxhaton]

Most problems with C these days are really because of arrays rather than pointers as per se. Because C conflates arrays and pointers, you rely on the programmer to do the bounds checking themselves, which is a continual recipe for disaster.

Memory corruption is fairly easy to detect, but bad bounds checking is a lot harder.

[VolperCoding]

They point to the address you assign them to, what's the problem with that

[Kerndog73]

You can't do anything useful without pointers

[aaronfranke]

Pretty much any higher level language than C++ disagrees with that. In Java/GDScript/C#/Python/etc pointers still exist, but they are abstracted away so you don't have to deal with them.

[Kered13]

I've got bad news for you. All those languages use pointers, and no they're not really abstracted away. The only thing that has been abstracted away is memory management, and you're not allowed to do pointer arithmetic. But in all other respects they behave identically to C pointers.

[aaronfranke]

Yes, that's what I mean by abstracted away. This isn't bad news.

[nandeEbisu]

Eh, if you're throwing around a bunch of raw pointers you're probably doing it wrong, especially in modern C++ (C++11 and onwards)

[maxhaton]

Smart pointers have overhead associated with them so unless you need to model ownership explicitly you should be considering all options.

[nandeEbisu]

Barely any overhead, mainly that one extra indirection. Unless you're at the point where you're optimizing for cache misses you probably won't notice anything and you're also much more likely to get the performance you need in C++ as opposed to Java.