With great power…

If there’s one thing I’d like you to take away from this chapter, it’s that C++ is a very powerful language, and with this power comes the programmer’s responsibility to use the appropriate level of abstraction.

I’m certain that a team of C++ programmers starting a new project today that solves specific business problems, using only the latest standard and specific libraries, can write code safely and with good performance without worrying about memory issues more than their Java or C# colleagues. In fact, it’s likely their code will resemble quite closely that written in other languages, with the expectation of better performance.

However, even such a team will occasionally face a choice: Do we implement a slightly less performant solution using the existing tools offered to us by STL, or do we optimize it to the stars by recursing to pointer arithmetic, move semantics, or custom memory management? This is when the power of C++ requires an equally high level of responsibility, care, and deep understanding.

Note

As I’m writing these words, the world is still in turmoil after the CrowdStrike incident of July 2024. The causes for the incident are still not 100% clear, despite the official disclosure (https://www.scmagazine.com/news/crowdstrike-discloses-new-technical-details-behind-outage). Either way, it looks as if a memory access error in a C++ program has led to a kernel panic in Windows systems around the world, grounding planes, stopping money transfers, and – most dreadfully – shutting down emergency services. Of course, this change should have never reached production, but it’s nonetheless a reminder of how much the world depends on software and of the consequences of the misuse of the power of C++.