[renox]

>I would hazard a guess that your coworkers would struggle in pretty much any language?

Uh? This issue wouldn't happen in Java because everything is heap(GC) allocated. Which is probably why developers new to C++ have this issue.

Walter Bright said below that the D compiler find most of these issue at compile time, well that's nice for D but unfortunately that isn't the case for C++ at least not for gcc9.

[WalterBright]

Doing what D does to detect references to expired stack frames would require some restructuring of C++'s semantics, which seems unlikely. For example, D can detect this error:

    @safe:

    int* f(int* p) { return p; }

    int* g() { int i; return f(&i); }

Compile with:

    dmd test -dip1000

and the result:

    Error: reference to local variable i assigned to non-scope parameter p calling test.f

[scatters]

At -O2 or above, gcc emits Wreturn-local-addr.

[renox]

Yep, ‘-O2 or above’ we used to compile our UTs without optimizations because otherwise it takes too long, but now we have an additional(less frequent) CI job for UT with optimizations to benefit from these improved error detection.

[mlyle]

Within a single compilation unit, and only in this most trivial case.

[WalterBright]

Here's an example of a much more complex case that is detected:

https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21745

[mlyle]

Yes, sorry if my comment isn't clear. D is very capable in this regard. While gcc with C/C++ code will spot a few trivial cases... including the one in the example above.