Last night, I decided to "practice" writing iterators. Specifically, I wanted to write a class that i could use in a new-style C++ range loop that would give me all files in a directory. Useless but fun practice, I thought.

I had Bjarne's latest book by my side, and the final draft of the C++17 spec in open in a PDF, and it took me a good 2-3 hours of trying before I "got" it.

I'm still not sure I'm doing it correctly, btw. It does compile without warnings, and it works, but I can tweak the iterator function signatures in seemingly incompatible ways and it still doesn't complain and still works, even when I swear it shouldn't. "Ok, surely by doing this I'll break it!" - nope, still works.

I don't love everything about Go, and once in a while I'll wish for more expressiveness, but I was never, ever, as 10% confused with it as I am with whenever I attempt to do something seemingly trivial in C++.