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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • By almost every measure, the world is better than it has ever been. Violence, poverty, starvation are all at or near record lows worldwide. Average lifespans are way up. We are just way, way more aware of what is going on in the world, and bad news drives more clicks than good news.

    There are some cracks, no doubt. For example climate change is showing its ugly head, inequality is rising in the US and some other developed countries, and lifespans are taking a slight dip in parts of the US. But, compared to almost anywhere at any time during history, this is a golden age.






  • Take a look at what even the proposer is saying wouldn’t be allowed in:

     (1) new and delete.  There's no way to pass GFP_* flags in.
    
     (2) Constructors and destructors.  Nests of implicit code makes the code less
         obvious, and the replacement of static initialisation with constructor
         calls would make the code size larger.
    
     (3) Exceptions and RTTI.  RTTI would bulk the kernel up too much and
         exception handling is limited without it, and since destructors are not
         allowed, you still have to manually clean up after an error.
    
     (4) Operator overloading (except in special cases).
    
     (5) Function overloading (except in special inline cases).
    
     (6) STL (though some type trait bits are needed to replace __builtins that
         don't exist in g++).
    
     (7) 'class', 'private', 'namespace'.
    
     (8) 'virtual'.  Don't want virtual base classes, though virtual function
         tables might make operations tables more efficient.
    

    C++ without class, constructors, destructors, most overloading and the STL? Wow.