Programmer Humor

19564 readers

818 users here now

Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

Keep content in english
No advertisements
Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

122

C++ try not to add footguns challenge (impossible) (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

31 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Source

Alt text:

A screenshot from the linked article titled "Reflection in C++26", showing reflection as one of the bullet points listed in the "Core Language" section

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

My bad, that's on me, it looks like the C++ libraries I found use either templates or boost's reflection. There might be a way to do it with macros/metaprogramming but I'm not good enough at C/C++ to know.

I'm learning rust and C at the same time and was mixing up rust's features with C's. Rust's answer to reflection is largely compile-time macros/attributes and I mistakenly assumed C's attributes worked similarly since they have the same name.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Ah. Rust's macros and the C preprocessor's exist in vastly different universes. The C preprocessor is literally just a fancy programmatic copy-and-paste tool. Rust macros read the input source code and then execute other source code (the macro definition) to generate new source code that the compiler then reads.

I love Rust, but Rust macros are arguably more of a footgun than compile-time reflection would be, and as amazing as serde is (and no, there's nothing comparable in standard-compliant C++ yet), there's a strong argument that compile-time reflection would be a preferable technique for deriving serialization, argument-parsing, and similar feature.