I'm doing a tiny project in c++ to teach myself, its infuriating. Forgot the pass-by-reference ampersand and spent a full hour trying to figure out why the program took so long...

Yeah, the cool kids nowadays call it "borrowing" for some reason.

@rantsauce that's because Rust uses that term. It has had to invent some words for the new concepts it introduced.

I still do not understand why references in C++ are a thing. They're doing the same thing as pointers, they have almost the exact same behavior except their syntax is different and obscures the fact that the function at hand has side effects.