It seems that some people never had taste for good reliable code. Use `void ` and now any error whatsoever is a direct undefined behavior. Moreover `std::span` clearly says that you are not* taking ownership of the memory (even though the language does not check it of course), while `void *` does not.

I understand that people can have many things to say about C++, and I do as well, but `std::span` should have been there decades ago and is such a life saver in these situations. A truly zero-cost abstraction which effectively saves you from a lot of troubles.

> "Now, suppose that you want to pass to this function a custom structure, like this:"

You would create another function that actually works based off that structure, rather than using your first function which operates on a set of bytes in memory. That way it's readable, like they want, and type-safe

Isn't there a way to make this an alias anyways?

Fair point (although to be honest: 'complexify' feels a bit of an exaggeration here to me), but the answer to this why is simple: document and express intent clearly. The compiler gave you an error first such that you're forced to consider what you're doing. Any seasoned C++ developer seeing this knows what this reinterpret_cast means.

> Wow. With std::span the complexity-meter bumps in the red zone and goes even higher!

Same remark: yes, it's a bit more text to read, but again: to me (and many others I'm guessing) this clearly expresses intent. I also do not find it particularly hard to read. I mean, it's C++, you're likely going to encounter templates at one point or another, except in super specific software perhaps. But no-one also ever argued the C++ learning curve was easy, and trying to make it easier by refusing to use features which were added for good reasons and instead going back to constructs which are the very source of those reasons seems a bit backwards.

> As a nice addition, if you use SAL annotations, the function could be decorated a bit to help code analyzers detecting memory bugs

Some might also say it complexifies and uglifies the code. And in any case makes it non-portable on top of that.

All cpp alternatives are more wordy.

I wonder how this conversation wound go if the was an as terse, but also typesafe cpp alternative.

That said I don’t have much against the use of void* or even char* here. If it works in C, it works in C++ just fine. std::span is not the right tool for this.

Dynamic languages can handle this with reflection, but with void* you can only pray nobody makes the mistake..

> BTW: As a nice addition, if you use SAL annotations

> Windows C++ Programming

Not everyone will see the irony, but the Windows user-mode application and library suite and the kernel now very heavily rely on the safety mechanisms of C++ that the author calls 'complex', 'uglif[ied]', and has 'los[t] the taste for good readable code'. I'm of course referring to the Windows Implementation Library: https://github.com/microsoft/wil This is explicitly an effort from MS WinDev to make Windows C++ code safer. User-mode applications writing native Windows code can and absolutely should use it, too.

Any time I see `void*` in C++ I ring-fence it as a C-ism and make sure I reinterpret_cast. For me, a bag of bytes is `std::span<std::byte>`. void * is a memory location with no provenance, no ownership, no size information, nothing.

C likes to play fast and loose and its proponents call it 'beautiful and simple', I call it a segfault/use-after-free/double-free waiting to happen.

However, the antithesis is also correct that there exist better solutions to solve the issues.

Both premises hold true.

I have an extensive assembler coding background on 6510, M68000, and i486. I had a very hard time accepting that something could be solved faster and more stable in a higher order language while the downside is more memory, more CPU etc.

More and more it turns out that programming languages are something accidentally read by machines and written by humans, even though this premise got destroyed lately by AI.

However, what I love about C++ is, that it has a basic canon of commands that can be used to build nearly everything while looking extremely ugly and hard to grasp if you don't read very slowly and accurately - so it is a very error prone and dangerous thing that rightfully got substituted by better constructs that allow for better distinctions as well as usage.

I could do everything in assembler (Hey Python users: you know that in the end everything ends up as machine code, don't you?) but it takes 100x times longer and is constantly reinventing the wheel.

Have you ever started to get into the intricacies of bit signs? No? Well, you should definitely, and to this day it gave me a lasting impression when I started wrapping my head around it, when I was 10 to 11 years old hacking my way into the world of assembler programming on C128.

You don't want to take every concept into consideration. You don't want to take interoperability into consideration. All the time!

You want to focus on the problem to solve, not the implications of the implementations all the time.

I am having such a blast very often using Python since it just works with much cognitive distraction about which language construct to use in order to get the machine doing what you want. It is so capable, enable it, to simply ensure within boundaries that the compiler uses the best decision given the context, which is up to analysis.

That's why I stopped using C++ or more precisely stopped any attempts and trying to be smart or fancy. I got to re-read and maintain the code month to years later and history showed, I don't marvel at how magic the line works and brutally smart I was at the time, but simply hate me for obscuring something in a line, that could be well understood if I had used 10 lines, while the compiler gives a damn anyway.

C++ is still necessary but every discussion to this day is about the point you made: every digit counts - and also which position, context etc. You got to be very prolific in order to put into a line what other put into 10.

Is it worth it? No.

In early days it was the correct decision. Memory was sparse, CPU power slow, and the language was small compared to today.

The last time I felt comfortable with a "assembler kind feeling" was with JavaScript before ES6. Peak jQuery level, with the most coolest concept only JavaScript has: Function.prototype.toString()

John Resig will have his place in my programming heroes olymp, who revealed this secret for me, and it opened my eyes for the beauty of higher order languages.

I admire C++, but so do I Python.

But I hope I won't have to ever use C++ again.

> Some good old habit from C can still be positively used in C++, like the void* pointer and the size parameters.

That's garbage.

There is a clear interest of passing both size AND pointer in a single parameter like `std::span<std::byte>`: it bind both value together and guarantee that you do not mess with the size of your buffer.

Pass "data" and "size" parameters through a chain of 5 function calls and there is a non-null probability that you passed "other_size" instead of "size" somewhere. The pattern happens everywhere in old C codebase and is a common source of buffer overflow.

All modern languages (including freaking Golang) have a "slice" concept built in: it is not just to annoy old grumpy programmers but *because* it is a major upgrade in term of memory safety.

> It seems that some people are really losing the taste for good readable code.

If 'span<std::byte>' or 'span<char>' are unreadable for you. The problem is not span, the problem is you.

These are concepts that has been existing for decades in many programming languages. Even in conservative C++, it exists since 2014 in the GSL or in boost.

> Why should people complexify and uglify their C++ code with the uint8_t pointer (or std::byte), when void* works just fine??

Sure. Let's extend the logic: I do propose also to replace all arguments of anything with a pointer type `void`... Because after all: 'It will just works fine' right ?

Type-safety is overrated, we should all use only bytes. /irony

> Or maybe something even more complicated, like this? > template <typename T, std::size_t N> void DoSomething(std::span<T, N> data)

First that's non sense.

If you want to pass a mutable buffer of byte, the correct signature is:

`void DoSomething(std::span<std::byte> data)`

There is zero need of function template declaration and I believe the author is fully aware of that.

`span<Type,N>` is there

> states that the pointer points to input read-only memory (_In_reads_)

You do that by using `std::span<const std::byte>` in any C++ codebase.

The fact he brags about that as "an advantage" for separated parameter passing just show currently how little is known here.

> My Pluralsight Courses

This kind of C++ code would be straight be refused in PR in almost any serious organization.

So bragging about it on a blog while proposing some C++ teaching is audacious to say the least.

So joke aside:

To finish, I would say there is very valid criticism on `std::span<std::byte>` : - Span does not do boundary check on access by default. Which is a bad design decision in 2026. - It has an impact on compilation time due to the inclusion of the header - std::byte is annoying to work with because it is a hack around an enum instead of a proper builtins type.

But the blog post misses all these points entirely.