[pron]

I don't agree that "you never have to worry about it" unless you're also using smart pointers, which is rarely what I want.

I think that the alternative where all allocations and deallocations are made clear (in Zig, allocating routines are "coloured" by convention) is the better alternative, at least for the kind of low-level programming I do and for my way of thinking about low-level code.

When I write code where I don't want to see or worry about each implementation detail or see exactly where and when each operation is executed, I use Java.

[CyberDildonics]

which is rarely what I want.

If you don't want memory leaks, it probably is what you want.

There isn't a ton of difference between putting a delete in a destructor and using a smart pointer, but the best approach is to go beyond smart pointers and just use a vector, which does everything for you.

A lot of this seems like you haven't done a lot of modern C++ to see how elegant and smooth it is.

[pron]

> If you don't want memory leaks, it probably is what you want.

No, sorry.

> A lot of this seems like you haven't done a lot of modern C++ to see how elegant and smooth it is.

It's true I don't want to use modern C++ (except for certain compile-time tests), and that's because when I write low-level code what I care about the most is being able to see the machine instructions that will be emitted, especially the ones related to memory management (I don't care so much about the computational instructions; the compiler, and the CPU, will rewrite them dramatically anyway).

If I find myself needing pretty abstractions, I reconsider my use of a low-level language. That's also why I'm philosophically opposed to the concept of zero-cost abstractions. What I want from C++ that C doesn't give me is templates and some other compile-time stuff, which are much more convenient for me than C macros. I don't want any implicitness in my low-level code. Zig gives me exactly what I want from a language that specialises in low-level code.

My problem with zero-cost abstractions is that they result in code that looks high-level, while still only really having a low abstraction level (what I mean by a high or low abstraction level is the extent to which I can make local changes without influencing non-local code). The resulting code looks pretty on the page, but makes me work a lot harder to understand what is being executed and when. When I don't want to care about such details, I use Java.

Just last week I had an interesting discussion, that's somewhat similar to this, about Haskell with a colleague. He said something like, look how clearly you can see the algorithm on the screen. And I said, yes, it looks great when trying to understand what it does by reading, but it's terrible to understand when you try analysing it in the debugger or profiler. The point is that there's different kinds of information that code can communicate. Sometimes you want just the function of the algorithm to be clear and want the language to hide execution details, and sometimes you're just as interested in the execution details.

[CyberDildonics]

Oooh yeah, sorry no, smart pointers and destructors do prevent memory leaks.

You said no then didn't back it up with anything and just went on a tangent of your own personal preferences.

[pron]

`smart pointers + destructors => no memory leaks` does not entail `no memory leaks => smart pointers + destructors`.

"My solution offers X, therefore, if you want X, you should use my solution" is just a logical fallacy; the conclusion doesn't follow from the premise.

Also, I'm not so sure smart pointers and destructors actually prevent memory leaks. E.g. cycles. You can deal with cycles, but memory leaks due to them are not "prevented" just by the use of smart pointers and destructors.

Java does prevent leaks due to cycles, but it still doesn't prevent leaks due to "forgotten objects", so you get memory leaks in Java, too, even though it has fewer leaks than C++/Rust with GC pointers. So given that you can have fewer leaks than with smart pointers and still not have them completely gone, I wouldn't say that smart pointers "prevent" leaks. But yes, they're one of the ways to reduce them.

[CyberDildonics]

Also, I'm not so sure smart pointers and destructors actually prevent memory leaks

Well, they do, that's why people use them. I'm not sure why you would make the case against using another language that makes management manual.

Also reference counting cycles are only even possible if you use reference counting in the first place, which isn't necessary for single threaded scope based memory management.

Java does prevent leaks due to cycles

Fantastic but you said zig is safe than C++, what does java have to do with it?

[pron]

> Well, they do, that's why people use them.

They're one of the ways of reducing, not preventing memory leaks. And they're pretty ok at that, but I find other approaches to work better for me.