Re: [GD-General] Compile times

[Kent Q. <ken...@co...>]

At 08:19 PM 12/15/2002 -0600, you wrote:
>Memory management bugs are something you encounter when learning how to
>program, but at some point they cease to be a significant problem when
>there is proper discipline in place.


You've said something similar to the "proper discipline" comment several 
times now, and I think you've got a blind spot going on here. If you're 
coding by yourself, personal discipline is all you need. But if you're 
coding on a team, you have to have discipline that applies to everyone on 
the team. And not everyone is a coding machine. Not everyone works on all 
the code all the time.

Even if every individual has perfect discipline in their own code (hah!), 
you'll find errors in the integration -- in the interfaces between modules. 
The old "He allocated it but *I* need to free it" is one example of the 
problem.

I've worked on big teams, small teams, and by myself. And some of the stuff 
you've dissed lately -- wrapping allocations in smart pointers, typesafe 
containers, and so forth -- are useful in almost direct proportion to the 
number of people working on the code. Though I still think that I benefit 
greatly -- even as an individual code -- from such things. It lets me think 
at a higher level.

         Kent




Kent Quirk, CTO, CogniToy
ken...@co...
http://www.cognitoy.com