Should focus on getting rid of undefined behavior.
Should focus on getting rid of undefined behavior.
What problem do you believe is presented by undefined behavior?
It violates the principle of least surprise. You don’t expect the compiler to delete your bounds checking etc.
The way c and c++ define and use UB is like finding an error at compile time and instead of reporting it, the compiler decides to exploit it.
It violates the principle of least surprise.
It really doesn’t. I recommend you get acquainted with what undefined behavior is, and how it’s handled by developers.
You don’t expect the compiler to delete your bounds checking etc.
By design, undefined behavior has a very specific purpose. Newbies are instructed to consider code that leads to undefined behavior as a bug they introduced. For decades compilers and static code analysis tools can detect and flag undefined behavior as errors in your code.
As I said before, sometimes it seems clueless developers parrot on about “undefined behavior” as some kind of gotcha although they clearly have no idea what they are talking about. Sometimes it sounds like they heard it somewhere and just mindlessly repeat it as if it meant something.
The way c and c++ define and use UB is like finding an error at compile time and instead of reporting it, the compiler decides to exploit it.
What are you talking about? Compilers can and do flag undefined behavior as errors. I recommend you read up on the documentation of any compiler.
Also, I don’t think you fully understand the subject. For example, as an example, some compiler implementations leverage UB to add failsafes to production code such as preventing programs from crashing when, say, null pointers are dereferenced. We can waste everyone’s time debating whether null pointers should be dereferenced, but what’s not up for discussion is that, given the choice, professional teams prefer that their code doesn’t crash in users’ machine if it stumbles upon one of these errors.
I am trying C++ for this year’s advent of code. The most asinine thing i encountered is that the bracket operator on std::map writes 0 value if the key is not found. So your code doesn’t compile if you declare a const map or a const map reference as a function parameter. Compiler fails with “discards const qualifier on argument”.
I mean, wtf?
Edit: this is probably true for other STL containers
The most asinine thing i encountered is that the bracket operator on std::map writes 0 value if the key is not found.
That’s a “you’re using it wrong” problem. The operator[] is designed to "Returns a reference to the value that is mapped to a key equivalent to key, performing an insertion if such key does not already exist. "
The “0 value” just so happens to be the result you get from a default initializer whose default initialization corresponds to zero-initialization.
If you want to use a std::map to access the element associated with a key, you need to either use at and handle an exception if no such key exists, or use find.