On 9/23/2011 4:13 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
But while C++'s const is not as good as D's const, it's still very worthwhile IMHO.
To me it's like buffer overflows. 99% of C/C++ code doesn't have buffer overflows, and is perfectly reliable. But if someone hands you a 1,000,000 line program and asks "ensure there are no buffer overflows" what are you going to do? What are you going to do when Junior Programmer makes a patch to your perfectly correct C/C++ code base, and now it has a subtle overflow bug? Start all over with the review process?
This is not an idle question, as a major focus of C static analysis tools is to detect buffer overflows, and people spend a lot of effort & money on them.
Faith based programming works in the small, but programs grow ever larger in size and complexity. Switching from faith to static guarantees is a much more scalable technique.
And where C++ const is really, really useless is when it comes to multithreaded programming.
