Anyway, this article illustrates a great reason why C++ is a beautiful mess. You can do almost anything with it, and that comes at a cost. It's the polar opposite ethos of "there should be one clear way to do something" and this sort of thing reminds me why I have replaced all of my systems language needs with Rust at this point, despite having a very long love/hate relationship with both C and C++.
Totally agree it should be marked as nodiscard, and the reasoning for not doing so is a good example of why other languages are taking over.
Languages like D [0] or Rust [1] get this right.
[0]: https://dlang.org/spec/operatoroverloading.html#index_assign... [1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/ops/trait.IndexMut.html
The stdlib is so bloated with these “Looks good, but wait” logic bombs.
I wish someone would just draw a line in the sand and say “No, from here on out, this is how this works and there are no other scenarios in which there needs a work around”. This is why other systems languages are taking off (besides the expressiveness or memory safety bandwagon) is because there are clear instructions in the docs on what this does with examples of how to use it properly.
Most c++ codebases I’ve seen the last 10 years are decent (a few are superb) and I get that there’s old code out there but at what point do we let old dogs die?
Many of the uses are in Google’s codebase.
Overall very technical- interesting if you are a library writer or maybe if you care about long term improvements in your C++’legacy codebase.
Returns a reference to the value that is mapped to a key equivalent to key or x respectively, performing an insertion if such key does not already exist.
Which is a bit of a surprise coming from mostly C and Go.
What are these 10% valid cases? Does someone have an example
Add an opt-in compiler flag --edition='26' which, when used, applies the breaking changes defined for C++26. Then users like Google or others who have been (ab)using some features for their side effects can decide to stay on the older versions.
But alas, existing code is considered sacred in the C++ cult so we must never ever inconvenience anyone maintaining legacy code, no matter how broken it is.