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    Arne Mertz

    arne-mertz.de · Personal blog · on HN since 2015

    Arne Mertz writes about modern C++ practices, including idioms, static analysis, ranges, and code quality.

    Visit blogHN submissions
    ProgrammingLanguages & Compilers
    What HN says

    HN links his April Fools post "Raw Pointers Are Gone", which readers struggled to tell from a real article, and his posts on C++ idioms.

    Stats for nerds
    26HN people shared it
    84linked in comments
    332story points
    Sep 2022last shared
    2018people per year2022

    Top posts on HN

    1. 1
      Modern C++ Features – std::optional
      1 person · 86 points · first shared 2018 · 113 comments on HN
    2. 2
      C++ Fun with(out) keyword explicit
      1 person · 34 points · first shared 2015 · 18 comments on HN
    3. 3
      New C++ features – lambdas
      1 person · 21 points · first shared 2015 · 24 comments on HN
    4. 4
      Modern C++ Features – override and final
      1 person · 20 points · first shared 2015 · 1 comments on HN
    5. 5
      Levels of Exception Safety in C++
      1 person · 14 points · first shared 2015 · Discussion on HN
    6. 6
      Modern C++ Features – constexpr
      1 person · 8 points · first shared 2016 · Discussion on HN
    7. 7
      Macro Evil in C++ Code
      2 people · 7 points · first shared 2019 · Discussion on HN
    8. 8
      Ranges: The STL to the Next Level
      2 people · 6 points · first shared 2017 · 1 comments on HN
    9. 9
      Use a static analyzer or two
      2 people · 6 points · first shared 2016 · 1 comments on HN
    10. 10
      C++ Core Guidelines are not Rules
      2 people · 5 points · first shared 2024 · Discussion on HN

    What HN people wrote when they linked it

    • signa11Mar 2018

      > All of this means that const actually provides zero guarantees about an object not being mutated (and even in the case where the object is directly constructed as const, that just means that it's undefined behavior when the object is mutated, not that the compiler actually protects against it being mutated).

      if this is the only reason why author thinks that const is a problem, then it is all good. you can do the same thing in C as well. and ofcourse, if you do that, and break things, you get to hold all the pieces as well :)

      probably a 'constexpr' semantics is what the author might be looking for ?

      arne-mertz article on mutable, available here: https://arne-mertz.de/2017/10/mutable/, which imho, is another side of the const-coin, is quite good as well.

      edit-001 : slight change.

    • cesarbApr 2018

      Having started using the Internet in the 90's, and thus still remembering Geocities-era websites, I loved that they did this as a webring (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring): each blog post has a link to the next one, making a singly-linked circular list.

      Starting with this one, we have:

      - http://www.bfilipek.com/2018/04/deprecating-pointers.html

      - http://www.modernescpp.com/index.php/no-new-new

      - https://www.fluentcpp.com/2018/04/01/cpp-will-no-longer-have-pointers/

      - https://blog.tartanllama.xyz/no-pointers/

      - https://arne-mertz.de/2018/04/raw-pointers-are-gone/

      And it circles back to this one.

    • spacechild1Apr 2022

      One of my favourite april fool's jokes in tech: https://arne-mertz.de/2018/04/raw-pointers-are-gone/

      It actually made it to the HN front page and people had a hard time deciding whether this was a joke or not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16727441

    • ryanianianJun 2019

      How is this different from the (relatively common afaik) passkey idiom https://arne-mertz.de/2016/10/passkey-idiom/ ?

    • ur-whaleSep 2022

      These are just examples to make a point.

      And: https://arne-mertz.de/2016/12/modern-c-features-attributes/

    • jhalsteadJun 2019

      This reminds me of the Passkey idiom: https://arne-mertz.de/2016/10/passkey-idiom/

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