std::string tends to be more complicated because of the small
string optimization. Most debuggers I've used don't handle
that correctly out of the box, even if sorting it out really
isn't difficult.
Almost all game developers use Visual Studio, and VS has
supported visualization of all STL containers(including string)
since VS2005.
This is really missing the point. He knows RAII is useful and he
knows RAII solves freeing free'd memory. Maybe it's time to
re-watch the video.
I watched it. None of what he said made much sense.
His claims:
1. RAII is bad because exceptions.
-Nothing forces to use exceptions, so irrelevant
2. RAII is bad because you must write copy constructor,destructor
etc each time.
-No you write a few basic template classes and reuse them.
Regarding exceptions, they can be used incorrectly, but I think
they tend to provide better error handling than return codes
*because no one ever checks return codes*. And when you do
pathologically handle error codes, the amount of code
duplication can be tremendous, and the chance for errors
involving improper cleanup can be quite high. Though again,
RAII can be of incredible use here.
That is all true, I agree that exceptions are better than error
codes.
But for games, the general design is that errors are impossible.
The game should never fail so exceptions serve little purpose.
-ran out of memory? Shut game down, this should not happen
-couldn't open a file? Shut game down, this should never happen
-out of bounds array access, invalid iterator etc: abort game,
found during development, fixed, should never happen.
-networking? This is one place where you do need to handle
errors, but do you need exceptions just to handle this one case?
Probably not
