Bulldozer00's Blog

The Problem

Bjarne Stroustrup’s keynote speech at CppCon 2015 was all about writing good C++11/14 code. Although “modern” C++ compilers have been in wide circulation for four years, Bjarne still sees:

I’m not an elite, C++ committee-worthy, programmer, but I can relate to Bjarne’s frustration. Some time ago, I stumbled upon this code during a code review:

class Thing{};
std::vector<Thing> things{};
const int NUM_THINGS{2000}; 
for(int i=0; i<NUM_THINGS; ++i) 
  things.push_back(*(new Thing{})); 

Upon seeing the naked “new“, I searched for a matching loop of “delete“s. Since I did not find one, I ran valgrind on the executable. Sure enough, valgrind found the memory leak. I flagged the code as having a memory leak and suggested this as a less error-prone substitution:

class Thing{};
std::vector<Thing> things{};
const int NUM_THINGS{2000}; 
for(int i=0; i<NUM_THINGS; ++i) 
  things.push_back(Thing{}); 

Another programmer suggested an even better, loopless, alternative:

class Thing{};
std::vector<Thing> things{};
const int NUM_THINGS{2000}; 
things.resize(NUM_THINGS);

Sadly, the author blew off the suggestions and said that he would add the loop of “delete“s to plug the memory leak.

The Culprits

A key culprit in keeping the nasty list of bad programming habits alive and kicking is that…

Confused, backwards-looking teaching is (still) a big problem – Bjarne Stroustrup

Perhaps an even more powerful force keeping the status quo in place is that some (many?) companies simply don’t invest in their employees. In the name of fierce competition and the never-ending quest to increase productivity (while keeping wages flat so that executive bonuses can be doled out for meeting arbitrary numbers), these 20th-century-thinking dinosaurs micro-manage their employees into cranking out code 8+ hours a day while expecting the workforce to improve on their own time.

The Hope

In an attempt to sincerely help the C++ community of over 4M programmers overcome these deeply ingrained, unsafe programming habits, Mr. Stroustrup’s whole talk was about introducing and explaining the “CPP Core Guidelines” (CGC) document and the “Guidelines Support Library” (GSL). In a powerful one-two punch, Herb Sutter followed up the next day with another keynote focused on the CGC/GSL.

The CGC is an open source repository currently available on GitHub. And as with all open source projects, it is a work in progress. The guidelines were hoisted onto GitHub to kickstart the transformation from obsolete to modern programming.

The guidelines are focused on relatively higher-level issues, such as interfaces, resource management, memory management, and concurrency. Such rules affect application architecture and library design. Following the rules will lead to code that is statically type safe, has no resource leaks, and catches many more programming logic errors than is common in code today. And it will run fast – you can afford to do things right. We are less concerned with low-level issues, such as naming conventions and indentation style. However, no topic that can help a programmer is out of bounds.

It’s a noble and great goal that Bjarne et al are striving for, but as the old saying goes, “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink“. In the worst case, the water is there for the taking, but you can’t even find anyone to lead the horse to the oasis. Nevertheless, with the introduction of the CGC, we at least have a puddle of water in place. Over time, the open source community will grow this puddle into a lake.