Re: The D Programming Language

From:
David Abrahams <dave@boost-consulting.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
2 Dec 2006 02:59:36 -0500
Message-ID:
<87d573forz.fsf@pereiro.luannocracy.com>
Jean-Marc Bourguet <jm@bourguet.org> writes:

"Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For Email)"
<SeeWebsiteForEmail@erdani.org> writes:

Well the only thing I can add is that in my limited experience,
debugging Java programs is much easier because there's never the case
that a dangling pointer misteriously overwrites some object it wasn't
supposed to.


Instead you are writing to an object which was supposed to be out of
existence for a long time. In my experience, that give you the same kind
of elusive bugs. Excepted that purify can't help you


I want to emphasize that point: when nothing is truly illegal (like
those things that C++ says cause undefined behavior), there's no way a
tool like Purify can tell you that the program did something wrong.

and that random behaviour including crashes are replaced by
deterministic, often plausible but wrong results.


Of course that can happen in a system with undefined behavior, too.
That said, it looks like a wash to me: incorrect programs have
different characteristics under the two systems but neither one wins
in terms of debuggability.

--
Dave Abrahams
Boost Consulting
www.boost-consulting.com

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