C's Biggest Mistake on Hacker News

[Arun Chandrasekaran]

On Tuesday, 24 July 2018 at 11:53:35 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote:
> On Tuesday, 24 July 2018 at 10:40:33 UTC, Dukc wrote:
>> On Monday, 23 July 2018 at 15:06:16 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote:
>>> And something that REALLY must be integrated into BetterC's 
>>> low-level standard library in some way IMHO...
>>
>> They already work, except for the concatenation operator 
>> because it obviously requires the GC. And converiting a 
>> pointer from C code to D is easy, because you can slice 
>> pointers just like arrays -it's just that it won't be bounds 
>> checked.
>
> Nice.
>
> But if you want D to be REALLY appealing to a majority of C++ 
> developers, you'd better provide them with the FULL D 
> experience.
>
> And unfortunately, using builtin arrays/strings/slices/maps in 
> the usual way is probably a big part for it.
>
> Don't forget that concatenating strings in C++ is perfectly 
> ALLOWED in C++, WITHOUT using a GC...
>
> #include <iostream>
>
> using namespace std;
>
> int main()
> {
>     string str, str1, str2;
>     str1 = "Hello";
>     str2 = "World";
>     str = str1 + " " + str2;
>     cout << str << endl;
>
>     return 0;
> }
>

Recently in my code base where similar concatenation worked fine 
in debug mode but crashed in release mode: Win64, VS2017. Worked 
fine on Linux, GCC 7.3. Had to use std::ostringstream to resolve 
it, or use use .append().

These kind of UB is what makes a language esoteric. C wins the 
lot for UBs nevertheless!