If people treated C++ as a maintenance-only language and used it only for legacy code -- like COBOL -- the world would be a better place. The world would also save billions of dollars.
This is not a matter of RAII or "smart" pointers (which are not even smart enough to deal with cyclic references unless the programmer explicitly breaks the cycle). It is a matter of a language whose high-level features are constrained by low-level concerns, where the features compose poorly, and where things that are obvious (like requiring that functions with a non-void return type have a return value along every control path) are simply omitted from the standard. It is dizzying to think of how much money has been spent on bugs that were made possible by C or C++; why are we continuing to waste time and money on these languages?
This is not a matter of RAII or "smart" pointers (which are not even smart enough to deal with cyclic references unless the programmer explicitly breaks the cycle). It is a matter of a language whose high-level features are constrained by low-level concerns, where the features compose poorly, and where things that are obvious (like requiring that functions with a non-void return type have a return value along every control path) are simply omitted from the standard. It is dizzying to think of how much money has been spent on bugs that were made possible by C or C++; why are we continuing to waste time and money on these languages?