Well, after starting using memory-management classes exclusively, and never again raw pointers, I have coded lots of C++ and I have never experienced any memory issues (leaks or access violations). I think C++ has issues much much worse than memory management.
Wow is it ever not my experience that C++ programs that avoid raw pointers don't have memory corruption issues. Note that my job involves looking at other people's C++ code, not just having opinions about my own, so I'm a bit more suspicious than most people.
Therefore your experience is that compilers and/or mainstream libraries are irredeemably broken, right? Because I can't think of any reason why your code should break havoc as long as you are following your language's and your libraries' guidelines and safe-code practices . And yes, I agree that's a PITA: I've ditched C++ for that reason. However, to me, as long as my profiler didn't show any memory leaks, and there were no crashes, then I assumed everything was fine. Maybe I was blessed in having discovered and mastered Design by Contract. And AFAIK, Python and Ruby interpreters are written in C... what makes them safer than average applications, then?
"Best practices" is a no-true-Scotsman argument. Any example I come up with of something that blows up a C++ program is going to contravene some best practice somewhere. A long time ago someone said buffer overflows were easy to avoid, and so I did a little math, counting up the revenues of companies that sold products that mostly mitigated the impact of buffer overflows. Billions and billions of dollars, lost to "inability to count numbers of bytes".
In any case, my pointier response to you is, "allocation lifecycle and use-after-free", which doesn't care how many layers of abstraction you wrap your pointers in.
"Irredeemably"? No, just very, very expensively. I suppose I should thank them.
