Arne Mertz
arne-mertz.de · Personal blog · on HN since 2015
Arne Mertz writes about modern C++ practices, including idioms, static analysis, ranges, and code quality.
What HN saysHN links his April Fools post "Raw Pointers Are Gone", which readers struggled to tell from a real article, and his posts on C++ idioms.
26HN people shared it
7linked it in comments
84stories submitted
332story points
3 years agolast shared
2015people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Raw Pointers Are Gone3 people · 1 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 2Macro Evil in C++ Code2 people · 7 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 3Ranges: The STL to the Next Level2 people · 6 points · first shared 2017 · 1 comments on HN
- 4Use a static analyzer or two2 people · 6 points · first shared 2016 · 1 comments on HN
- 5C++ Core Guidelines are not Rules2 people · 5 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 6Smelly std::pair and std::tuple2 people · 4 points · first shared 2017 · 1 comments on HN
- 7Docker4c: Portable C++ Development Environment2 people · 4 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 8Hello CMake2 people · 4 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 9Terseness: How little is too much? (2018)2 people · 3 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 10C++ is not an object oriented language2 people · 3 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 11C++: RAII versus Exceptions2 people · 3 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 12The PImpl Idiom2 people · 2 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 13Passkey idiom2 people · first shared 2019
- 14Modern C++ Features – std::optional1 people · 86 points · first shared 2018 · 113 comments on HN
- 15C++ Fun with(out) keyword explicit1 people · 34 points · first shared 2015 · 18 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
spacechild1 · 2022-04-01
One of my favourite april fool's jokes in tech: https://arne-mertz.de/2018/04/raw-pointers-are-gone/
It actually made it to the HN front page and people had a hard time deciding whether this was a joke or not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16727441
ur-whale · 2022-09-22
These are just examples to make a point.
And: https://arne-mertz.de/2016/12/modern-c-features-attributes/
jhalstead · 2019-06-11
This reminds me of the Passkey idiom: https://arne-mertz.de/2016/10/passkey-idiom/
ryanianian · 2019-06-11
How is this different from the (relatively common afaik) passkey idiom https://arne-mertz.de/2016/10/passkey-idiom/ ?
cesarb · 2018-04-01
Having started using the Internet in the 90's, and thus still remembering Geocities-era websites, I loved that they did this as a webring (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring): each blog post has a link to the next one, making a singly-linked circular list.
Starting with this one, we have:
- http://www.bfilipek.com/2018/04/deprecating-pointers.html
- http://www.modernescpp.com/index.php/no-new-new
- https://www.fluentcpp.com/2018/04/01/cpp-will-no-longer-have-pointers/
- https://blog.tartanllama.xyz/no-pointers/
- https://arne-mertz.de/2018/04/raw-pointers-are-gone/
And it circles back to this one.
signa11 · 2018-03-06
> All of this means that const actually provides zero guarantees about an object not being mutated (and even in the case where the object is directly constructed as const, that just means that it's undefined behavior when the object is mutated, not that the compiler actually protects against it being mutated).
if this is the only reason why author thinks that const is a problem, then it is all good. you can do the same thing in C as well. and ofcourse, if you do that, and break things, you get to hold all the pieces as well :)
probably a 'constexpr' semantics is what the author might be looking for ?
arne-mertz article on mutable, available here: https://arne-mertz.de/2017/10/mutable/, which imho, is another side of the const-coin, is quite good as well.
edit-001 : slight change.