[guillaumec]

I notice more and more pushes to 'improve' C and turn it into something it should not become. I feel like the C++ community gave up on C++ because of the growing complexity and so turned to C with the hope of adding to it the good parts of C++ without the ugliness. But this is of course hopeless: every added feature will create new issues that will be solved with new features until the language becomes too complex for anyone to fully understand.

[fch42]

The part in it that I don't understand is ...

Again, "traditionally", one could (ab)use C++ as "C with extras". And it wasn't uncommon, especially in resource constraint usecases, to do just that. C++ without STL or templates, or even C++ without new/delete.

This "is not C++", agree. Would a subset be enough for "using it like C-with-RAII" ?

Given the details and pitfalls the original author lists, I suspect not. It's not just C programmers who "do strange things" and make odd choices. The language itself though "lends itself to that". I've (had to) write code that sometimes-alloca'ed sometimes-malloc'ed the same thing and then "tagged" it to indicate whether it needed free() or "just" the implied drop. Another rather common antipattern is "generic embedded payloads" - the struct definition ending "char data[1]" just to be padded out by whatever creates it to whatever size (nevermind type) of that data.

Can you write _new_ C code that "does RAII" ? Probably. Just rewrite it in rust, or zig :-) Can you somehow transmogrify language, compiler, standard lib so that you can recompile existing C code, it not to "just get RAII" then at least to give you meaningful compiler errors/warnings that tell you how to change it ? I won't put money on that.

[actionfromafar]

New/delete were never that great to begin with and have now fallen out of style. Also, C++ is quite useful and powerful even without STL.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc

A classic which touches on such stuff.

[jandrewrogers]

The STL is pretty dispensable in my experience, even for people doing full-blown modern C++, and C++20 has made that particularly obvious. The most useful feature somewhat unique to C++ is the extensive metaprogramming facility, which only recently became non-arcane.

[bluetomcat]

> Can you write _new_ C code that "does RAII" ? Probably.

You can do "manual" goto-based RAII in C, and it has been done for decades. The end of your function needs to have a cascading layer of labels, undoing what has been done before:

    if (!(x = create_x())) {
        goto cleanup;
    }

    if (!(y = create_y())) {
        goto cleanup_x;
    }

    if (!(z = create_z())) {
        goto cleanup_y;
    }

    do_something(x, y, z);

    cleanup_z:
    destroy_z(z);
    cleanup_y:
    destroy_y(y);
    cleanup_x:
    destroy_x(x);
    cleanup:
    return;

It just takes more discipline and is more error-prone maintenance-wise.

[raydev]

> until the language becomes too complex for anyone to fully understand

Like C, with its many hidden behaviors?

[uecker]

What hidden behaviors? The only hidden behaviors I can think of which are somewhat problematic in C are implicit value-changing conversions. But one can instruct compilers to diagnose those.

[tempodox]

Not hidden, the C standard spells it out. And implementation-defined behavior can be observed.

[dgellow]

Could you be more specifics? What improvements do you mean?

It’s not clear if you’re talking about defer or RAII