Thanks for the very thorough response! I will absolutely check this out. I would say I have a fair bit of experience in OO programming. A decent amount from JS and also a good bit from C#, which I dabbled in for a good while during my “I’m going to make a game in unity” phase haha.

I know enough C++ to get myself in trouble, but it seems every time I have to use it I get super frustrated that things aren’t as simple as they are in other languages I’m familiar with. That, and I never seem to know the exact terminology to look up my particular issue (which is half the battle anyways).

I actually needed to write a UDF in C for my mariadb instance just the other day. It ended up taking me several hours for something that would have taken me just minutes in JS or C#. It ended up being a pointer + memory allocation issue. Basically I wasn’t clearing the allocated memory and resetting the index between function calls. It also frustrates me to no end that I can’t just array.push() to add a new char to the end of a char array lol.

I also wrote a VST with Juce in C++ a few years back. I got it working eventually, but God I remember it being an absolute nightmare.

I guess really I have a hard time understanding when and why it’s even necessary to use pointers etc since that stuff has been abstracted away in the higher level languages I know. It seems like you could essentially get the same functionality by just knowing when things are passed by value vs passed by reference.