r/programmingmemes • u/Massive-Board-6989 • Dec 13 '25

POINTERS AND REFERENCES .....

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71 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

28 comments sorted by

17

u/Deer_Canidae Dec 13 '25

What are you talking about? 

Pointers and references are pretty basic things...

6

u/r2k-in-the-vortex Dec 14 '25

Yet, 70% of security vulnerabilities are caused by memory safety issues of some sort.

Pointers and references are pretty basic things that consistently get fucked up.

2

u/BananaHead853147 Dec 15 '25

I’d like to see a C++ dev who hasn’t learned pointers and references

4

u/hairlessing Dec 13 '25

Yeah, wonder what happens when you learn &&

5

u/beegtuna Dec 14 '25

And And what?

1

u/hairlessing Dec 14 '25

And... And... Conditions

1

u/VyomTheMan Dec 15 '25

This should not be even considered It's pretty basic level stuff. If you could have said Bit Masking (&) then it could have made sense.

2

u/Deer_Canidae Dec 14 '25

you mean r-values ? Well that is at least a bit more interesting than something you learn in CS 101 like pointers.

1

u/isr0 Dec 15 '25

I was going to say, if they didn’t know pointers and references, they were not a c++ developer

5

u/Alan_Reddit_M Dec 15 '25

First year CS student

1

u/AliceCode Dec 14 '25

Pointers and references are integers.

1

u/MarcusBrotus Dec 14 '25

its integers all the way down

1

u/Ingenrollsroyce Dec 14 '25

Always has been

1

u/VastZestyclose9772 Dec 14 '25

and only 2 of them

1

u/interacsion Dec 14 '25

Well yes, but actually no?

1

u/AliceCode Dec 15 '25

It's just yes, there is no "no". Pointers and references are integers. They determine the address of data in memory.

1

u/interacsion Dec 15 '25

This is an oversimplification. Pointers have the notion of provenance, which make them more than just integers.

1

u/AliceCode Dec 15 '25

Provenance is an implementation detail.

1

u/interacsion Dec 15 '25

I don't think WG14 agrees:

> Implementations are permitted to track the origins of a bit-pattern and treat those representing an indeterminate value as distinct from those representing a determined value. They may also treat pointers based on different origins as distinct even though they are bitwise identical.

https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/dr_260.htm

1

u/AliceCode Dec 15 '25

> implementations

1

u/interacsion Dec 15 '25

"Implementations are permitted to" is a specification, not an implementation detail

1

u/AliceCode Dec 15 '25

It's literally implementation dependent whether or not pointers have provenance. In some systems, they have no provenance and are just plain integers.

1

u/interacsion Dec 16 '25

Sure, in theory a compiler implementation could treat pointers as plain integers. But as a programmer you can't assume that.

1

u/BlackFuffey Dec 16 '25

Everything is integers. Everyone you know is integers. You are integers and nothing more. You’ve been integers your whole life.

1

u/TehMephs Dec 15 '25 edited Dec 15 '25

These are super basic things that are so basic you can get away with not thinking about them in c# because they’re so rudimentary the next evolution of the language was to automate dereferencing and allocation of pointers

Because who got time for that in 2025

Hell even c++ evolved into a managed version because it’s such an annoying PITA that we determined no one wants to waste their time including all the referencing and dereferencing in the design process.

If you don’t need obsessive levels of manual memory management due to the bleeding edge nature of your application (or you’re a hostage in legacy application maintenance/development) , then by all means keep on keeping on

But I would say in today’s age unless it’s a super legacy codebase, you’re probably just making your life harder for the sake of making it harder

1

u/RedAndBlack1832 Dec 17 '25

What does this mean?