I've watched a number of Bjarne Stroustrup presentations, and this is a particularly interesting one. It's interesting to hear him talk about the cost of abstractions, and when and where to spend that cost. Shame about the audio in some sections (somebody link a clean version if it's out there), but it's worth persevering.
Sheet 16: for 8-bit chips probably stick to assembler - bullocks! The C++ style that is appropriate for small 32-bot Cortexes is perfect for 8-bit AVRs too. And for ancient chips like PICs and 8051 a C-dialect is more appropriate than assembler.
44:40: And there you run headlong into a limitation of C++. That code is bad, and it cannot be made good. The problem is that the return value of fclose() is not checked. Personally, I treat fclose() failure as a write failure (so if it happens in a read stream I don't care, but on a write stream I have to assume the file wasn't written correctly). Now, ~File_handle() cannot return an error code, and it should not throw an exception (or else, if the file is destroyed because of an exception, this itself causes undefined behavior). So there is nothing that ~File_handle() can do to signal failure. So the failure gets silently ignored, and the file is corrupted.
