Quantifying Accidental Complexity: An empirical look at teaching and using C++ Herb Sutter 9/21/2020 1 Herb Sutter 4 We’re “paying taxes” all the time Productivity Correctness and quality Tooling Tooling Teaching, learning, hiring, training 2 4Quantifying Accidental Complexity: An empirical look at teaching and using C++ Herb Sutter 9/21/2020 2 5 Common claim: “C++ is too complex” This talk's complexity Inherent in the problem, present in any solution Accidental complexity Artifact of a specific solution design 5 6Quantifying Accidental Complexity: An empirical look at teaching and using C++

fashioning of the complex conceptual structures that compose the abstract software entity, and accidental tasks, the representation of the abstract entities in programming languages and the mapping of gains in software productivity have come from removing artificial barriers that have made the accidental tasks inordinately hard, such as severe hardware constraints, awkward programming languages, lack of machine time. How much of what software engineers now do is still devoted to the accidental, as opposed to the essential?”Agile Abstract “Therefore it appears that the time has come to

the Committee ▪ No one does ▪ Polls 29SAFETY & SECURITY ▪ What is safety? ▪ Limiting the (accidental) damage to a system caused by bugs ▪ Prefer prevention (compile-time) over detection (run-time) ▪ Cannot write a no-false-positive sanitizer to detect it ▪ Cannot tell the difference between accidental wrapping and deliberate wrapping 34P0122R0 ARRAY_VIEW: BOUNDS-SAFE VIEWS FOR SEQUENCES OF OBJECTS

1. Benefits (such as efficiency) do not justify added complexity 2. Unbalanced relationship was accidental (missed opportunity for one of): • Separation of Concerns: Could have established Orthogonality 1. Benefits (such as efficiency) do not justify added complexity 2. Unbalanced relationship was accidental (missed opportunity for one of): • Separation of Concerns: Could have established Orthogonality

on your touchpad. Disable touchpad while typing Turn the touchpad off while typing to prevent accidental clicks. Simulate a right mouse click Press and hold the left mouse button to right-click. Simulate scrolling… See Also Disable touchpad while typing — Turn the touchpad off while typing to prevent accidental clicks. Click, drag, or scroll with the touchpad You can click, double-click, drag, and scroll laptops are often located where you rest your wrist while typing, which can sometimes cause accidental clicks while you type. You can disable the touchpad while you type. It will only work again

situation where we have multiple parameters in a function with the same type. It is very easy to make accidental switcheroos (e.g. source/destination being flipped) without a compiler error. void send(Address

Safety CppCon 2024 29 My Bias: Embedded Security Goals: • Show examples that • guard against accidental mistakes • reduce cognitive load in reviews • Provide inspirations for your use cases Non-Goals:

Prevents calculations from being added into gradient computation graph. Usually used to prevent accidental training on validation/testing data. Save/Load Trained Models ● Save torch.save(model.state_dict()

better • spans are implicitly constructible from arrays and vectors • Avoids ownership confusion, accidental pointer arithmetic • span ➡ span; span ❌ span • Shallow const, like

better • spans are implicitly constructible from arrays and vectors • Avoids ownership confusion, accidental pointer arithmetic • span  span; span 🐞 span • Shallow const,