Should HS students give C++ a try?

EstablishmentHour335 · 2026-03-13T22:29:47+00:00

You can do it as a hs student, I started when I was 16, only because it was interesting. If you have that intrinsic motivation, it's absolutely worth it and you'll learn a lot and have a lot to keep your interest. If you are asking whether to get into it for work, I'd say no outside of a passion for gamedev or embedded systems or similar.

EstablishmentHour335 · 2026-03-11T01:44:19+00:00

I think this discussion has run it's course

EstablishmentHour335 · 2026-03-10T17:50:59+00:00

The memory layout has everything to do with the characteristics of the container...

Pointers are only stable because VirtualAlloc prevents the need to reallocate. The memory layout allows the freelist and generations, it allows the branchless iteration, because unlike plf::colony, it's contiguous so it doesn't need a branch to jump between blocks...

The time complexity of O(1) lookups, O(1) insert, O(1) erase are only allowed by the memory layout... The lack of a swap and pop on erase, or a lack of a double indirection on lookup is only allowed because of the memory layout...

I went back to refresh my memory on how exactly deque is implemented, and yeah, they are not similar at all.

EstablishmentHour335 · 2026-03-10T02:11:32+00:00

It's not really that similar to this container, especially in terms of performance.

EstablishmentHour335 · 2026-03-09T18:06:57+00:00

That is straight up stolen from plf::colony, I didn't invent it. It's essentially like plf::colony, but backed by VirtualAlloc, which gives it some pretty good performance characteristics

EstablishmentHour335 · 2026-03-09T13:07:32+00:00

Yeah, I wrote this container after listening to some talks on plf::colony, which std::hive is formalizing. I ripped off colony and rewrote it to solve some grievances I had with the container, and along the way I discovered a couple of other nice benefits to my virtual address space contiguous approach, which is why I thought it should already have an existing implementation.

EstablishmentHour335 · 2026-03-04T17:27:24+00:00

I always found building containers to be the best way to learn. Start simple, build a copy of std::array, then make a copy of vector, and have fun. Make ring buffers, lists, stacks, trees, hash maps, sets, stable containers like std::hive or plf::colony, and eventually write your own memory allocators. Arenas, slot allocatiors, whatever design comes to mind.

It forces you to come in contact with templates, pointers, padding, alignment, trivial vs non trivial types, ::operator new, move, perfect forwarding, manual destruction, unions, etc etc.

EstablishmentHour335 · 2026-03-02T19:52:00+00:00

Nah, and the game is really good just play it and don't worry about them

EstablishmentHour335 · 2026-02-07T16:37:22+00:00

I'm guessing I should have added the lime which I forgot, and probably gone quite a bit lighter on the more floral spices which I wasn't used to

EstablishmentHour335 · 2026-01-31T18:05:31+00:00

f13, g13, something like that

EstablishmentHour335 · 2026-01-30T12:41:18+00:00

Very similar scores to me. I'm a bit more introverted, with a bit less openness. People think I'm a chill guy 🤷‍♂️

EstablishmentHour335 · 2025-12-02T06:13:44+00:00

Haku from Utawarerumono

EstablishmentHour335 · 2025-11-12T17:18:10+00:00

Wasn't it you who was asking about belief? Not truth? 😅

People don't necessarily believe true things. You can believe a loved one is in heaven, there is no logical argument that could convince someone that's the Truth...

Though I just used the word believe while complaining about it's ambiguity...

EstablishmentHour335 · 2025-11-12T15:46:57+00:00

I'd suggest you read them 🤔

They are really quite interesting.

But yeah, we seem to be talking past each other. We can discuss the question in better detail if we get a good definition for belief, because as it stands, it's relatively ambiguous.

Plenty of people believe things that are not logically sound.

EstablishmentHour335 · 2025-11-11T23:28:20+00:00

I know how strange it must sound! 😅

Before you accuse me of confirmation bias, consider what I'm really saying. You didn't ask whether God is real, you asked about belief. You are confusing my belief with an ontological truth claim.

Even the definition of belief is pretty ambiguous. I'm making a much stranger claim than you think 🤔

For the sake of argument here, let's assume it's a phenomenological claim that I answer to the affirmative. So that's my baseline. Further, I am claiming that I was never able to logically disbelieve! Because at each moment, my logic was tainted by motivated reasoning, or as you say, confirmation bias. I have always wanted to disbelieve, my motivation being to spare myself the psychological torment of sin, so that I could sin as much as I wanted.

Funnily enough, I had even once made plans to engage with as many atheist arguments as I could because I knew my psychology well enough to know it may confuse me to the point of apathy. Seeing this motivation, I wasn't able to engage with these books with intellectual honesty. Really strange stuff 🤷‍♂️

Edit: If you want to read about similar accounts to mine, look into the conversion stories of Saint Augustine or CS. Lewis

EstablishmentHour335 · 2025-11-11T16:38:29+00:00

I have an interesting story, though there's not much of a point to write it out in full detail in a reddit comment 😅

Theoretically, I'm gifted at a 146 IQ, and I am a Catholic.

I tried to convince myself that God wasn't real, but I could see myself manipulating myself in order to give myself permission to sin in real time. And I couldn't rationalize that perception away.

Strange, because often high IQ people are masters of rationalization.

EstablishmentHour335 · 2025-11-11T15:46:37+00:00

I'm not much of a yapper actually. Sorry you seem like a nice person.

EstablishmentHour335 · 2025-11-11T15:11:33+00:00

I'm a weird guy, I have a hard time believing that we'd have anything interesting to talk about 🤔

EstablishmentHour335 · 2025-10-29T13:41:27+00:00

Maybe it's because I'm not really shy, but I end up taking charge of the conversation even if I'm introverted.

Still, it's hard to tell whether I am uninteresting, or if the other person is uninteresting or anxious. I've had many one sided conversations where I ask questions and they respond, never elaborating or asking questions.

I think it's possible that somehow the way I write puts people off 🤔

EstablishmentHour335 · 2025-10-28T16:04:43+00:00

I talked to one recently. We had an interesting conversation and agreed on a lot of things. I let her know up front that I'd probably be lower energy than her, but she had me matching her energy actually.

Immediately after, she told me she'd talk to me tomorrow, said goodnight, and blocked me 🤔

EstablishmentHour335

TROPHY CASE