C++ programmer's guide to undefined behavior: part 7 of 11
Your attention is invited to the seventh part of an e-book on undefined behavior. This is not a textbook, as it's intended for those who are already familiar with C++ programming. It's a kind of C++ programmer's guide to undefined behavior and to its most secret and exotic corners. The book was written by Dmitry Sviridkin and edited by Andrey Karpov.
C++ programmer's guide to undefined behavior: part 7 of 11
by Dmitry Sviridkin
From the article:
In the early '70s, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Brian Kernighan worked on the first versions of C and Unix. They made a decision that resonates with pain, suffering, bugs, and inefficiency today, 50 years later. They decided that developers were to write strings—variable-length data—in a sequence that terminated with a null character. Assembly has it, and C should have it too, if people call it "high-level assembly"! After all, the poor old PDP has limited memory: it's better to have one extra byte per string than 2, 4, or even all 8 bytes (depending on the platform) to store the size... Nah, it's better to have a byte at the end! But even other languages store a size, a reference, or a pointer to the data...
Exploring how different languages solve the same problem often reveals interesting contrasts, especially when it comes to implementing powerful features like reflection. While C++26 aims to introduce introspection and code generation via P2996 and P3294, Rust’s approach using its derive macros offers a mature solution for code generation, even without introspection, highlighting different philosophies in language design and their practical applications.
In C++20, the standard library introduced new synchronization primitives: std::latch and std::barrier. These are the utilities designed to coordinate between concurrent threads.