The title itself is a recipe for disaster. Also this is a semi rant.

Yesterday I was informed that I will have the honour to implement the core functionality - which is an interface layer to use the driver of a very expensive hardware shit - of the software I’ve been working on as a frontend dev.

There are two possibilities for the language: C++ or C#. The one that was proposed/imposed is C#, which I know nothing of, while at least I have some hobbyist experience with C++; when asked if I could take some time to familiarise myself with C# I was basically laughed in the face, saying I will learn on the field and at least some of them have some experience with it.

Should I insist to go with C++, or is that an even worse idea in an already fucked up situation?

  • @Heavybell
    link
    51 year ago

    Okay that is a bit rougher. Best of luck I suppose. Hopefully you can lean on your colleagues somewhat. If I had one piece of advice, look up the using block, it basically ensures an object gets disposed immediately when it goes out of scope, which is the closest C# lets you get to deallocating memory. The object needs to implement IDisposable tho.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      31 year ago

      To clarify for OP, the only time you need this at all is when the object has a reference to something that the garbage collector won’t dispose of naturally. Things like an open file stream, db connection, etc.

      You won’t need to dispose of an object you created if it just has properties and methods

      • @Heavybell
        link
        11 year ago

        Circular references can also impede garbage collection, don’t forget.

        And to further clarify, a proper object wrapping a resource like the ones you listed will release them when it is eventually collected, in the finalizer/destructor. However, you can’t know when that will happen, so we have IDisposable.Dispose() which can be used to release whatever critical resources the object is holding right away. :)

    • @PixxlMan
      link
      11 year ago

      You only need to use IDisposable for disposing unmanaged resources (file io etc). In modern .NET there are actually ways to perform manual memory management using malloc and delete etc, but it’s unlikely you’d ever need it.