[aurelius]

I think you've taken a pretty narrow interpretation of "reliable software". It seems more reasonable to think that Bjarne was speaking at a general level, i.e., the idea that software written in non-garbage collected languages tends to be prone to memory management errors on the part of the programmer.

This has been a common meme for the past 15 to 20 years precisely because it is so easy to forget when a block of memory needs to be freed. However, the mechanisms of reference-counted smart pointers, RAII, and clearer ownership semantics in the language, go a long way to help mitigate the common manual memory management problems in C++.

The downside, of course, is that you have to know how to use these ideas to write "reliable software", and C++ does not make it easy. It's pretty much impossible to go from reading the standard to implementing correct and optimal C++ programs. There are so many gotchas, corner-cases, and features which require much study and experience to truly understand.

[mikeash]

I'm not arguing that you need to avoid dynamic memory management to write "reliable software." I'm just pointing out that a lot of reliable software is written that way, and thus the idea that you need garbage collection to write reliable software is so obviously false that it's silly to think anyone believes it to be true, making it a terrible straw man to argue against.

[lomnakkus]

> I'm just pointing out that a lot of reliable software is written that way, and thus the idea that you need garbage collection to write reliable software is so obviously false that it's silly to think anyone believes it to be true, making it a terrible straw man to argue against.

You're also arguing a straw man. Of course you can write reliable software without dynamic allocation. The question is: can you do it faster and/or cheaper using C++ or $ALTERNATIVE?

(You mentioned rocket and spacecraft guidance software as examples. That's an example of software that's exceedingly expensive to develop... and it doesn't actually do that much even though it's obviously complex.)

[mikeash]

What straw man am I arguing?

You say, "Of course you can write reliable software without dynamic allocation." Why is that "of course," if the myth being addressed is that you cannot write reliable software without garbage collection? If you're saying everyone knows that you can write reliable software without GC, and it'll just be expensive and such, then we're in agreement, because that's exactly what I'm saying.