this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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Not really. Pointers are almost always a bad idea - just use const refs and you'll be fine.
If using pointers is out of the question, then why choose to learn a language with explicit memory access before anything else?
I have yet to learn Rust, but from what I hear it's simpler and (mostly?) memory-safe – implying that it's generally a better first language to learn.
Pointers are almost always a bad idea - but you'll probably get a lot of mileage out of having a handful of them in a large project... there's an impulse with new C++ devs to do everything with pointers and use complex pointer arithmetic to do weird array offset and abuse predictable layouts to access stack variables etc.... pointers are fine when used with moderation.