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Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I think it's pretty easy to be sure that this isn't where the complexity comes from when there's literally a method to do that on arrays. I'm not even sure which language you're talking about here, because you can call `.len()` in Rust or `.size()` in C++.

If you're trying to remember what the language is where there's no immediately obvious straightforward way to get the length of an array, it's not Rust or C++; you must have been thinking of C.

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This is a case of exactly the "hoarder" modality in C++ that I described. When somebody says array in C++ you think of std::array, the newer shiny C++ class which you're asked to use instead of the native array types. The native array types in C++ still exist and indeed do not provide methods like size()

In Rust the arrays aren't stunted left over primitive types which weren't gifted modern features, array.len() works because all Rust's types get features like this, not just the latest and greatest stuff.

While it is true that only class types have member functions in C++, that does not mean that objects of other types demand the use of macros. C++ also supports non-member functions, and the standard library contains a fair amount of these; including `std::size` that can be used to "get" the length of an array.

(C++ arrays are different from arrays in many other programming languages, though not necessarily Rust, in that their type specifies their length, so in a way this is something you already "have" but certainly there are cases where it is convenient to "get" this information from an object.)

Ah, std::size, since c++17. No wonder nobody knows about it, that’s after we all started switching to rust.

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