alt Hacker NewsThe paranoia about memory use in C++ should mostly be a thing of the past if you’re using smart pointers and sane patterns. In 2026 almost nobody should be calling new and delete and passing around raw pointers.
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AlotOfReading • today at 2:56 PM
And yet applications written in modern C++ are constantly discovering new memory safety issues. Sean Baxter wrote a whole manifesto talking about the shortcomings of the existing C++ model [0].
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foldr • today at 2:57 PM
C++ still doesn't have a sane modern pattern for tagged unions. If you want to define a type to represent, say, a simple parse tree, then Rust makes that easy and obvious, whereas C++ offers you a hundred options, all of which suck.
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The reality though it many people are not using smart pointers. I have seen many people argue they don't like them because they want to see every place delete is called. (meanwhile of course they never notice all the places it should be called but isn't - but at least where it is they see it)