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Comment by yeputons | Hacker News Reader

They do leak memory sometimes. Cito frees variables, but not temporary values. It also has no chance of knowing whether a third-party function takes ownership of an object or not.

The simplest example is string interpolation, I've just submitted an issue: https://github.com/pfusik/cito/issues/26

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To be fair, the line between "Cito does not frees temporary values" and "the programmer screwed up by using wrong kind of references" is a little blurry. Most of my code in the issue above can be attributed to me writing dangerous code and getting shot in the foot, not Cito's issues.

However, I don't think a project may simultaneously have dangling references and claim to follow "Principle of least astonishment". Dangling references are unsurprising if you've been using C++ a lot, but I expect them to be very surprising to people coming from basically any garbage-collected language: Java/C#/Kotlin/JavaScript.

I do not expect anyone to code a C or C++ library with no awareness of memory errors. This isn't a safe language on top of C++. If you target C++, you need to know it.

On the other hand, if you only know "safe" languages and target "safe" languages, there will be no dangling references.

By POLA, Ć doesn't reinvent keywords (compare to Rust) and the translated code is meant to look "obvious" compared to what you wrote in Ć. It's not "knowledge of C# is sufficient to write code correct in eight other languages" (that would be quite astonishing actually).

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