Comment by jdsully
7 years ago
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.
I’ve been an iOS engineer for 7 years and I’m not exactly a fan of Objective-C. I’m good at it though, I know where all the sore spots are and part of my value is I can stop people from hurting themselves with the language. One day, inshallah, our team can eventually move on to swift (thank you ABI compatibility).
Until then I work in it because my goal (and my job) is to deliver amazing products and experiences to my customers and if I had to do that in COBOL, I’d do that too. My job is not about the language for me, it’s about what I’m doing with it.
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.
New features can reduce the complexity of code, but they cannot reduce the complexity of the language.
C++ programmers still need to know what "new" and "delete" do, so they can work with older code that uses them. They also need to learn what "auto" does, so they can work with newer code that uses it. (The behavior of "auto" isn't trivial; how many C++ programmers understand the difference between "auto v = <expr>;" and "decltype(<expr>) v = <expr>;"?)
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I hate unique_ptr and shared_ptr, using them is so glaringly inconsistent. Half the time you can’t construct a unique_ptr when it’s easy, because you don’t have the information until just enough later (like after a calculation or two in the body of your constructor) that you can’t use the easy way. So how do you transfer a unique_ptr? Well, the obvious ways don’t compile, and you eventually learn you have to move it, which involves using std::move(), but it always seems to go in the place I don’t expect it. And then how do you use a unique_ptr outside of your class? You can’t pass by value, for obvious reasons. Pass by reference, maybe? I think that’s frowned upon, I think you’re supposed to pass a naked pointer, and Modern C++ code is supposed to understand that naked pointers mean I’m loaning you this pointer. But I thought the point of Modern C++ was to get rid of pointers? Anyway, shared_ptr works completely the opposite way. You are supposed to pass the pointer by value. Now you can argue that of course it’s supposed to be that way, and the arguments are all cogent and when you spend half a day figuring it all out it makes sense. Until tomorrow when you forget it all and have to actually use the things. Plus I hate underscores with a passion, it hurts to type them. Modern C++ also seems to like making a line of code longer and longer, because you can’t just make a unique_ptr or shared_ptr with a constructor, no, you need make_unique<typename>(...), and the arguments are magically the same as the type’s constructor, even though it’s obviously a different function. Yuck! At least new and delete are pretty obvious how to use, and only have one special case to worry about ([]). Granted, the *_ptr are better, but I hate using them and wish I could use something that was shorter and easier to remember.
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How does auto improve performance? Doesn't it just expand to whatever type a human would have manually had to put there in the first place?
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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.
Its a bit like IE6. A big upgrade over C but the next update took so long that it was hated at the end of its life. Which coincidentally is exactly why C++ now does timed releases.
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.