re: I'm an Expert in Memory Management & Segfaults, Ask Me Anything! VIEW POST


Any advice for complete new coding beginners please would appreciate it?



Don't mess with manual memory management...yet.

It's very, very easy to proverbially blow a limb off with manual memory management. Get skilled with the fundamentals of programming first, and establish habits that allow you to write clean, stable code in a higher level language.

Once you can write a few hundred lines of code in, say, Python or Java, and have them work right on the first or second attempt, then dive into more advanced concepts. Manual memory management is something that's easy to get wrong, so you need to first have an established track record with yourself of getting things right.

Before I ever touched C++ and memory management, I had written a couple of reasonably stable, small applications, and had actually implemented a programming language in ActionScript 3.0 with regular expressions. (I don't recommend the latter; it was a great challenge, and it worked great for the purpose it was designed, but it pretty well sucked in terms of performance.)

With all that under my belt, I was able to start using C++. Even then, I avoided manual allocation whenever possible, using memory-safe tools and methods first. Once I was experienced with those, I started doing more and more manual allocation and raw pointer arithmetic. I made a lot of mistakes at the start, but that's how we learn best!

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