Yes if you remove all frivolity I’m sure the joke will be funnier

I definitely agree on the last point. Personally I like languages where I can get the compiler to check a lot more of my reasoning, but I still want to be able to use all the memory management techniques that people use in C.

I remember Jonathan Blow did a fairly rambling stream of consciousness talk on his criticisms of Rust, and it was largely written off as “old man yells at clouds”, but I tried to make sense of what he was saying and eventually realised he had a lot of good points.

I think it was this one: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4t1K66dMhWk

That’s what std::move does, and you’re right that it’s quite an ugly hack to deal with C++ legacy mistakes that C doesn’t have.

I say move semantics to refer to the broader concept, which exists to make manual memory management safer and easier to get right. It’s also a core feature of Rust.

Also I’m talking about parametric polymorphism, not subtype polymorphism. So I mean things like lists, queues and maps which can be specialised for the element type. That’s what I can’t imagine living without.

I would have said the same thing a few years ago, but after writing C++ professionally for a while I have to grudgingly admit that most of the new features are very useful for writing simpler code.

A few are still infuriating though, and I still consider the language an abomination. It has too many awful legacy problems that can never be fixed.

The only conceivable way to avoid pointers in C is by using indices into arrays, which have the exact same set of problems that pointers do because array indexing and pointer dereferencing are the same thing. If anything array indexing is slightly worse, because the index doesn’t carry a type.

Also you’re ignoring a whole host of other problems in C. Most notably unions.

People say that “you only need to learn pointers”, but that’s not a real thing you can do. It’s like saying it’s easy to write correct brainfuck because the language spec is so small. The exact opposite is true.

I’m not a fan of C++, but move semantics seem very clearly like a solution to a problem that C invented.

Though to be honest I could live with manual memory management. What I really don’t understand is how anyone can bear to use C after rewriting the same monomorphic collection type for the 20th time.