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Darren New <dne### [at] san rrcom> wrote:
> On 7/24/2011 3:38, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> > On 23/07/2011 06:37 PM, Darren New wrote:
> >
> >> Interesting.
> >
> > I'm ticked by "C++ crashes a lot if it's immature".
> >
> > What, if C++ is immature? Or the C++ codebase is immature? Or perhaps you
> > mean if the C++ developers are immature? ;-)
> I think they meant your code crashes a lot if it's written in C++ and hasn't
> had lots of debugging.
I think it depends a lot on the competence of the C++ programmer(s).
Granted, becoming a very competent C++ programmer (whose code seldom crashes,
or if it does, the crashes get caught very early on the development cycle)
may require more work than with some other languages, but it's not impossible.
Of course with C++ (and C and other C-compatible languages) the rare
circumstance where you get a nightmarish bug can be pretty fun. By
"nightmarish" I'm talking about the random crashes that happen sometimes
but not always (so that it's very difficult and laborious to get the program
to crash on purpose), where the debugger is of no help whatsoever even if
you are running in full debug mode (you either get no stack trace whatsoever,
or the stack trace is completely unhelpful because the crash happens
somewhere in the main runloop rather than in your code), where no debugging
tool is reporting any error (ie. no memory leaks, no zombie objects, no
misuse of STL, nothing), and the system does not have nor support tools like
valgrind. And you have no idea whatsoever which line from the tens of
thousands of lines of code is causing the problem (and that's if you are
lucky and it's just a bug in one line somewhere, rather than it being some
really hard to find combination of conflicts).
I wonder if something similar ever happens with the "safer" programming
languages (eg. you get a "null pointer exception" or some other similar
error and have absolutely no idea why, and no debugging tool is helping).
--
- Warp
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