On Tuesday, 31 December 2013 at 00:45:51 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
I really think the built-in new should be discouraged - it has a lot of disadvantages over using a library setup, and not many advantages.
Huuuge +1 from me. A while ago, I heard someone state that allocation and object construction should be separate concepts and "new" kind of clobbers the two concepts together. Over time I've started recognizing that this as well and I've really started thinking that a "new" operator is actually a bad thing, despite it being a short and convenient way to do that process.
Once you start thinking of allocators as "objects" you start realizing that using the "new" operator is like you've been using global variables all over the place (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's pretty shocking that no one really made the conscious choice to do so and most languages have made the choice too transparent when it actually matters quite a lot).
