Comment by marcosdumay
7 years ago
> That vision just doesn’t seem to work out in practice
Well, about half of the Python ecosystem seems to disagree.
7 years ago
> That vision just doesn’t seem to work out in practice
Well, about half of the Python ecosystem seems to disagree.
Python is likely the best example of this working, however even in Python the boundaries between high and low performance sections are very formal. It's a lot simpler to go in and optimize a piece of code the profiler has pointed out with C++.
I really don't understand the animosity non-C++ developers have towards the language. You can still use Python, Rust, etc if you want. Nobody wants to force you to use C++.
I am a C++ developer by career. Me and many other C++ developers I know do not really like the language. It is what it is. It has useful parts, but complexity is a weight.
How do you end up being a C++ developer that hates the language? I’m a C++ developer as well, and if I ever decided that’s I didn’t like what I was doing every day I’d learn a different language and try to get hired for that.
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Non-C++ developers are usually awed by it. The animosity comes from people with experience in C++ that decided not to use it.
Pre-11 C++ was a bad language. The gains of leaving it to something like Java (that isn't even good by today's standards) were huge. The new standards are making it possible to create better code on the language, but it is still far from a modern language and the added features can not remove complexity, they can just add to it.
> the added features can not remove complexity, they can just add to it
There are countless examples of the so-called modern C++ features reducing complexity in code.
For example, it is now considered a code smell to ever write "new" or "delete" in your code. Imagine that, never using these words to manually allocate and delete memory in C++! But it's true, unique_ptr in particular makes so much simpler and safer.
Type inference with auto doesn't just save typing, it improves performance in many cases and reduces a lot of complexity, while also avoiding uninitialized variables.
These are just a few of at least a dozen examples that come to mind about reducing code complexity with more modern C++ features.
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I disagree that pre-11 C++ was bad. It would be bad now to make a new language that looked like pre-11 C++ but there is a reason it was so popular.
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I worked full-time in C++ from 2012 to 2017, and I don't like the language. I also did feel like I had to use it: I was a developer on an Apache/Nginx webserver plugin, and since those are written in C our choices were (1) C, (2) C++, or (3) a C shim that communicates with some other language. None of these options were ideal, but of them (2) was our best one.