Perils of C++ debugging: Petrifying functions

http://www.yosefk.com/blog/the-c-sucks-series-petrifying-functions.html

by mbrubeck • 17 years ago

26 19 17 years ago

The short version:

He hates C++ and C++ debuggers

Creating huge objects on the stack makes a program dump core due to a stack overflow, depending on the default stack size of the operating system. So a program that used to run OK might suddenly crash after an OS update and the error output wouldn't be very helpful.

bensummers• 17 years ago

I should get back into the habit of reading comments first. It would have saved a lot of time in this case.

loup-vaillant2• 17 years ago

You may have missed the paragraph about books pretending C++ is high level. My understanding is that he hates that, not necessarily C++ itself. I see this rant as yet another proof that C++ is as low level as C.

I think the sooner we admit this simple fact, the sooner we will be able to see C++ for what it is: a niche language, probably not worth it's huge spec.

thras2• 17 years ago

I've written low-level C++ calling functions from Fortran and doing all sorts of magic to do out-of-core matrix calculations.

I've written high-level C++. Generic code with all my objects cleaning up after themselves.

So my experience is that C++ is a large language that allows programming in many niches.

DanielBMarkham2• 17 years ago

This reminds me of a guy I knew who spent all the time working on his car. All day long, and all night, he'd be outside underneath banging away at something.

I asked him once, "say, you must really like your car"

He said, "Hell no! This POS! Can't stand it. It's a wonder it even runs for one day without my having to tinker with it"

You have to really love something a lot to have an entire series of articles about how bad it is.

And as far as the specifics of this article, it's only so much noise. C++ lets me shoot myself in the foot because different operating systems have different stack sizes and nobody told me about it.

Okay -- welcome to the big leagues, kid, where we play without nets.

mbrubeck2• 17 years ago

It's not just the articles on his blog; yosefk is also the author of the C++ FQA Lite: http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/

He probably hates C++ more than anyone in the universe. (And probably knows more about it than anyone except veteran C++ implementers and committee members.)

DanielBMarkham2• 17 years ago

Yes I thought this author was a rerun -- I remember his FQA being posted here a year or so ago.

The opposite of love is not hate; it's ambivalence. So he must really still carry a torch for the old girl.

wwalker3• 17 years ago

He may be using the wrong debugger. When I recreate and run his project in Visual Studio, I get this error:

Unhandled exception at 0x00b31747 in Bogus.exe: 0xC00000FD: Stack overflow.

The debugger points you to the offending line in a well-commented assembly routine described as ";_chkstk - check stack upon procedure entry".

It's immediately obvious this is a stack overflow, which takes you past the first half of his long article. However the second part of the article is still valid -- you still have to track down which of your objects is the big one.

rwmj• 17 years ago

I wonder here if the problem is really just the small default stack size on Linux. In fact, why is the stack limited to 8MB by default?

(I'm no fan of C++, but I suspect a number of languages that allow general stack allocated objects could fail in the same way).

pavlov• 17 years ago

8 MB is also the default on Mac OS X. That's for the main thread -- for other threads (at least those created by the standard pthread mechanism), it's only 512 kB:

http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/qa/qa2005/qa1419.html

stonemetal• 17 years ago

Could be worse on windows (even 64bit) it defaults to 1MB and a spacious 4MB on Itanium.

asdlfj2sd33• 17 years ago

As a long time C++ programmer is very much appreciate expert C++ advice, even if it comes from someone who hates C++.

This was great, and I would like to add that any good programmer should know that it is easily possible to run out of stack space, especially with recursion.

Perils of C++ debugging: Petrifying functions

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