[tomlagier]

I have a somewhat related question -

I took CS 101 ~ 301 in college, and have worked briefly in C++ here and there during my career. I like to think I have a working understanding of pointers and references.

Despite that, whenever I go into a C++ codebase (recently, the Chromium codebase) I get _completely lost_ trying to figure out what the owner and lifetime of an object is, whether it's appropriate to pass by value, reference, or clone. I have absolutely no clue the impact of these decisions aside from a vague sense that pass-by-reference is more memory efficient and cloning is safest (When do we care? Is it something you can just pick one and forget about until performance matters?).

How do you start to pick up an intuition for manually working with memory this way? Is there a set of references that can take you past the beginner level? I find the C++ reference documentation completely opaque, and most search hits tend to be too domain specific to be useful.

Is this something that Rust would help with? Is their model easier to understand when each case is correct? Is it something that comes with language exposure? Or tooling?

[tene]

Rust is a huge help with exactly this problem. The compiler will clearly tell you exactly where you've made a mistake if you give it code that violates the ownership rules, like trying to keep a reference past its valid lifetime.

It took me a little bit to get used to, but learning this definitely helped me learn to think about ownership and lifetimes better. I highly recommend you try learning some Rust.