I’ve been a developer for 25 years and worked with C++ on and off for most of it, and I still find it a headache getting to grips with a new codebase. It’s aggressively context-dependent so it often feels that to understand one small piece of code, you need to understand the whole damn application. - ThreadSky

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andy-pearce.com • 11 days ago

I’ve been a developer for 25 years and worked with C++ on and off for most of it, and I still find it a headache getting to grips with a new codebase. It’s aggressively context-dependent so it often feels that to understand one small piece of code, you need to understand the whole damn application.

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andy-pearce.com•11 days ago

I started my career in C. If you saw a function called, you knew you just had to find the one function with the same name linked into the same executable, and you could follow the execution. C++, conversely (and some might say perversely), delights in giving you ways to obfuscate this simple task.

andy-pearce.com•11 days ago

Which derived class is this a pointer to? Which constructor was used? Is the method overloaded? Is it even virtual? If not, which base class provides it? Which of its overloads will be chosen? Is it templated? Is there a specialisation for this type? Is this operator overloaded? Etc.

christosilvia.bsky.social•11 days ago

It's particularly fun if you are working with a codebase and don't understand these concepts!

andy-pearce.com•11 days ago

Yeah, C++ can seem like black magic until you’re familiar with most of its twelve billion features. That’s why people learn simplifications like “don’t call virtual methods in destructors”, and are then taken by surprise to find you actually can—you just have to be very familiar to do it safely.

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