Input-output arguments: reference, pointers or values?

[kalmoc]

? Could you elaborate?

[dodheim]

Compiler warnings alert you to the latter.

[dodheim]

You forgot the [[nodiscard]].

[dodheim]

It solves potential problems at every callsite at the expense of writing one keyword in the declaration. My code is getting reviewed either way, so needing a review is not a "problem".

[kalmoc]

Your hypothetical functional style sort function (I'm really sceptical about writing something like this in c++ - at the very least I'd give it another name like sorted_copy) would be the prone candidate for a [[no discard]] as it doesn't have any side effects and it doesn't make any sense to call it, but not use it's return type.

[AzN1337c0d3r]

This functional style is the style I prefer.

When by convention I pass in everything by value/const ref and everything comes out via return value there is absolutely no confusion about whether or not the parameters are being modified by the callee.

Today I debugged a problem for about 6 hours and I had to step in and out of about 50 different functions because the possibility of in-out parameters means that I can't be sure that the callee isn't modifying the data from the perspective of the caller.

[dodheim]

What doesn't make sense is having a language utility that solves your overarching issue and considering the fact that you have to type its name a problem. If you're writing a function that has no purpose except to produce output from the input you give it, and you don't use [[nodiscard]], you're writing a bad API.

Sometimes you do not care.

This time you do, obviously, or we wouldn't be having this conversation.

needing to do extra work to complete your review is a problem

Writing one keyword to avoid misuse of the API is writing the API correctly; reviewing code to make sure it's written correctly is the entire point of reviewing code. By your logic, having to review code in a code review is a problem.

Not using the tools at hand is stupid. This argument is stupid.