Rich Herrick liked his ranged types in Ada, and missed them when developing in C++. So he rolled his own, and now he has some protection from out-of-range and overflow conditions in his code. Sure, there's some overhead, as there always is when trading execution or compile time for safety, but Rich's implementation does a pretty good job of limiting the cost, and maximizing the benefit. Check out Ada-style Ranged Types in C++.

Freelancer Blog

One of the loudest criticisms I hear about C++ is that it doesn't have garbage collection. In other words, whenever a program allocates memory, some other part of that program has to figure out when to free it.

Of course, that figuring out can often be automated. As an obvious example, every standard-library container class keeps track of its own memory and frees it as needed. Nevertheless, it is hard to resist the belief that automatically freeing memory would make life a lot simpler for C++ programmers.

Continue reading "Automatic memory management -- no panacea"