Not so much of a joke as a cute story. There was once a programmer with a dog named Biff who would bark at the mailman every time he delivered the mail. The programmer wrote a program to monitor incoming email and beep when you got a message, and named it biff.
I think that’s the only thing I dislike about rust. Not having to use * to dereference but later having to use is tad confusing. I know it’s still clever solution but in this case I prefer c++'s straightforward consistency.
C++ does have the problem that references are not objects, which introduces many subtle issues. For example, you cannot use a type like std::vector<int&>, so that templated code will often have to invoke std::remove_reference<T> and so on. Rust opts for a more consistent data model, but then introduces auto-deref (and the Deref trait) to get about the same usability C++ has with references and operator->. Note that C++ will implicitly chain operator-> calls until a plain pointer is reached, whereas Rust will stop dereferencing once a type with a matching method/field is found. Having deep knowledge of both languages, I’m not convinced that C++ features “straightforward consistency” here…
I find ChatGPT more coherent than stackoverflow in many cases. Sure it hallucinates and sometimes acts like it has dementia but at the very least it won’t write 5 paragraphs about how the framework behind my issue works without giving any examples.
Stackoverflow is good for finding alternative approaches, getting explanations for how stuff works in the framework, and error investigations. Useless for getting information on stuff you don’t already know.
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