Question

Describe some design trade-offs between efficiency and safety in some language you know.

Answer 1

Some design trade-offs between efficiency and safety in C++ language can be written as follows:

• The conflict between writability and reliability is a common one in language design.
• The pointers of C++ can be manipulated in a variety of ways, which leads to highly flexible addressing of data. Because of the potential reliability problems with pointers, they are not included in java.

In general the pro's and con's can be written as follows:
C++

• Extension of C with object-oriented programming, still able to run C code.
• Compatible with C source code, except for a few corner cases.
• Write once, compile anywhere (WOCA).
• Allows procedural programming, functional programming,object-oriented programming, generic programming, andtemplate metaprogramming. Favors a mix of paradigms.
• Runs as native executable machine code for the targetinstruction set(s).
• Provides object types and type names. Allows reflection through RTTI.
• Has multiple binary compatibility standards (commonly Microsoft (for MSVC compiler) and Itanium/GNU (for virtually all other compilers)).
• Optional automated bounds checking (e.g., the at()method in vector and string containers).
• Supports native unsigned arithmetic.
• Standardized minimum limits for all numerical types, but the actual sizes are implementation-defined. Standardized types are available through the standard library<cstdint>.
• Pointers, references, and pass-by-value are supported for all types (primitive or user-defined).
• Memory management can be done manually through new / delete, automatically by scope, or by smart pointers. Supports deterministic destruction of objects. Garbage collection ABI standardized in C++11, though compilers are not required to implement garbage collection.
• Resource management can be done manually or by automatic lifetime-based resource management (RAII).
• Supports classes, structs (POD-types), and unions, and can allocate them on the heap or the stack.
• Allows explicitly overriding types as well as some implicit narrowing conversions (for compatibility with C).
• The C++ Standard Library was designed to have a limited scope and functionality but includes language support, diagnostics, general utilities, strings, locales, containers, algorithms, iterators, numerics, input/output, random number generators, regular expression parsing, threading facilities, type traits (for static type introspection) and Standard C Library. The Boost library offers more functionality including network I/O.
• A rich amount of third-party libraries exist for GUI and other functionalities like: ACE, Crypto++, various XMPP Instant Messaging (IM) libraries,[3] OpenLDAP, Qt, gtkmm.
• Operator overloading for most operators. Preserving meaning (semantics) is highly recommended.
• Single and Multiple inheritance of classes, including virtual inheritance.
• Compile-time templates. Allows for Turing complete meta-programming.
• Function pointers, function objects, lambdas (in C++11), and interfaces.
• No standard inline documentation mechanism. Third-party software (e.g. Doxygen) exists.
• const keyword for defining immutable variables and member functions that do not change the object. Const-ness is propagated as a means to enforce, at compile-time, correctness of the code with respect to mutability of objects (see const-correctness).
• Supports the goto statement.
• Source code can be written to be platform-independent (can be compiled for Windows, BSD, Linux, Mac OS X,Solaris, etc., without modification) and written to take advantage of platform-specific features. Typically compiled into native machine code, must be re-compiled for each target platform.

Thank you.