alt Hacker News> It seems that some people are really losing the taste for good readable code.
It seems that some people never had taste for good reliable code. Use `void ` and now any error whatsoever is a direct undefined behavior. Moreover `std::span` clearly says that you are not* taking ownership of the memory (even though the language does not check it of course), while `void *` does not.
I understand that people can have many things to say about C++, and I do as well, but `std::span` should have been there decades ago and is such a life saver in these situations. A truly zero-cost abstraction which effectively saves you from a lot of troubles.
Replies
> A truly zero-cost abstraction
Sadly the MSVC ABI makes std::span and std::string_view a pessimisation:
> but `std::span` should have been there decades ago
Absolutely! I now use it consistently in all new projects where I can afford to mandate C++20. I guess nobody bothered to make a proposal before...
That is quite common among C developer culture, play loose and brace for impact.
> I understand that people can have many things to say about C++, and I do as well, but `std::span` should have been there decades ago (...)
Decades is kind of a stretch. C++11 introduced smart pointers, and finally getting C++0x out of the door was already a major victory. Given the history of C++, it would be unrealistic to introduce something like std::span before C++17.
Meantime, some organizations are still struggling to migrate to something like C++14.
There's lots of UB in C-family execution models. Some of which is not actually UB because the implementation defines it - e.g. aligned DWORD-sized memory access is atomic on Windows because Microsoft said it is.
By choosing to use this language you choose to navigate the UB. Otherwise you'd be writing in Go, or Python.
It is possible to write reliable code despite the presence of UB in a language just like it's possible to drive to work every day for 20 years despite most of the directions you can point the car leading to an immediate crash. That's a needle with a much thinner eye than UB in C, and most people manage it. Mainly it means being very careful about lifetime and ownership. The Linux kernel manages it 99% of the time simply by being careful about lifetime and ownership, and that's a project with a huge number of contributors who don't intimately know each other's modules. I'm the Linux kernel you can't just say "new whatever" - you must have a plan for a lifetime of that whatever, and other people will review it.
I agree with you about std::span.