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Cake day: July 18th, 2023

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  • It’s been almost a decade since I used C++ and had to verify, but after some quick searching around it looks like it hasn’t changed a ton since I last looked at it.

    You can use smart pointers, and certainly you should, but it’s a whole extra thing tacked on to the language and the compiler doesn’t consider it an issue if you don’t use them. Using new in C++ isn’t like using unsafe in rust; in rust your code is almost certainly safe unless marked otherwise, whereas in C++ it may or may not be managed properly unless you explicitly mark a pointer as smart.

    For your own code in new codebases this is probably fine. You can just always make your pointers smart. When you’re relying on code from other people, some of which has been around for many years and has been written by people you’ve never heard of, it becomes harder to be sure everything is being done properly at every point, and that’s where many of these issues come into play.


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    C and C++ require more manual management of memory, and their compilers are unable to let you know about a lot of cases where you’re managing memory improperly. This often causes bugs, memory leaks, and security issues.

    Safer languages manage the memory for you, or at least are able to track memory usage to ensure you don’t run into problems. Rust is the poster boy for this lately; if you’re writing code that has potential issues with memory management, the compiler will consider that an error unless you specifically mark that section of code as unsafe.



  • I wouldn’t call it a bug, just that a naive ranked ballot naturally favours the centrist voices. I don’t even mean this in an extreme way: in Canada we basically have three centrist, neoliberal parties running parliament, and this would mean that the Liberals just win a majority almost every time. NDP voters generally won’t vote Conservative, Conservative voters won’t vote NDP.

    This can turn into a bug because it ends up pushing other voices out: if the popular vote suggests equal support between left, right, and center candidates, you would typically hope the make-up of the government reflects that, but more likely it would look like a center majority. There are ways to mitigate this (large number of parties, electing multiple candidates on a ballot, proportional components of the vote, etc) but ranked choice on its own tends to be a centralizing force, not a way to get a more representative democracy.

    Again, not a bug, and I definitely wouldn’t call it worse than FPTP, just making it clear that it has its own biases that are worth taking into account.



  • Honestly? Bash. I tried a bunch a few years back and eventually settled back on bash.

    Fish was really nice in a lot of ways, but the incompatibilities with normal POSIX workflows threw me off regularly. The tradeoff ended up with me moving off of it.

    I liked the extensibility of zsh, except that I found it would get slow with only a few bits from ohmyzsh installed. My terminal did cool things but too slowly for me to find it acceptable.

    Dash was the opposite, too feature light for me to be able to use efficiently. It didn’t even have tab completion. I suffered that week.

    Bash sits in a middle ground of usability, performance, and extensibility that just works for me. It has enough features to work well out of the box, I can add enough in my bashrc to ease some workflows for myself, and it’s basically instantaneous when I open a terminal or run simple commands.