← Back to context

Comment by curious9999

1 day ago

> Most likely the raise of AOT compiled alternatives, for scenarios where C and C++ were only being used due to being compiled languages, big names in C++ compiler world rather put money on their own alternatives, are the two main reasons of the slow down.

What alternatives?

Rust claws at market share but has problems with basic stuff like doubly linked lists, WIP gccrs and memory unsafety, Carbon looks like a meme with too few people working on it, Ada has a neglected dialect and a proprietary dialect, Go has garbage collection, Zig has not even reached 1.0, Swift is more of an application language than a systems language, Circle is dead.

What else is there?

Not that C++ doesn't have challenges.

12 comments

curious9999

Reply
ogoffart  21 hours ago

> Rust claws at market share but has problems with basic stuff like doubly linked lists, WIP gccrs and memory unsafety,

Doubly linked lists aren’t that important today. Rust doesn’t need gccrs to be useful, and it gives much better memory safety than C++ without needing a GC. So I find your criticism of Rust seems a bit weak. Rust is a strong alternative to C++.

  • curious9999_2  11 hours ago

    > Doubly linked lists aren’t that important today.

    I guess Rust is just not a viable or good language if one cannot even implement easily something as basic as a doubly linked list. Doubly linked list is the bare minimum; if that is not easy to implement, more complex data structures will often be even worse.

    Rust, contrary to public claims, often does worse on memory safety than C++, which is a sad state of affairs.

    I fear my arguments are way stronger than yours, sorry. Please make it easier to implement data structures in Rust.

    • ogoffart  7 hours ago

      > Rust, contrary to public claims, often does worse on memory safety than C++, which is a sad state of affairs.

      Nonsense! Where do you get that from?

      Aslo, you can make easily make linked list, it's just not a recommended data structure.

      2 replies →

pjmlp  21 hours ago

Go, Java (GraalVM/OpenJ9), .NET (Native AOT, .NET Native, IL2CPP, Mono AOT), Swift, Objective-C, D, Nim, Ada.

Many people that use C and C++, do it out of habit, any compiled language, even with AOT is capable to deliver for most scenarios in userspace code.

99% of user software written in compiled languages isn't systems programming juggling pointers and type casts.

Even when that is the case, all above languages have FFI features, no need to rewrite the whole thing.

You might have noticed that C and C++ are minority languages in the mobile OS duopoly, for starters, being used only for low level OS services, and game engines.

  • curious9999_2  11 hours ago

    I think it is fine for C and C++ to be relegated for use caches where they make the most sense. I don't see the point of comparing them to niches, markets or cases where for instance garbage collection is fine.

    And, I already mentioned Go, Swift and Ada.

    Objective-C is not really on my radar, it's specific to Apple, and it doesn't seem like Apple is betting on it for the future.

    D and Nim are languages with low momentum relative to others.

    I am not sure the AOT approach will work. Maybe, maybe not. There are direct and indirect obstacles, I believe. D is probably interesting here; as I understand it, it supported both GC and no-GC. But, that meant that a lot of libraries used GC, and thus were not necessarily good options for applications that required no-GC. In some ways, a programming language can also be what people build with it and what its ecosystems are like.

0dyl  18 hours ago

>Ada has a neglected dialect and a proprietary dialect

What on earth are you on about? That’s not the case.

Ada 2022 has been released and Ada 202x is getting improvements. Those features are trickling into FSF GNAT (GCC).

Are you talking about the SPARK dialect, where GNATprove is open source?

  • curious9999_2  11 hours ago

    It was indeed the SPARK dialect I am referring to.

    I find the Ada community difficult to navigate, the existence of multiple dialects does not make it easier. Please do correct me if I am wrong, and I apologize for any mistakes that I might have made.

    If it is not the case that the SPARK language or its proprietary compiler is ahead of what is available publicly, why does this page say that pattern matching is in production:

    https://github.com/AdaCore/ada-spark-rfcs/blob/master/featur...

    While as far as I can tell, it is not part of normal, not-SPARK Ada, and either is not available in open source compilers, or might require enabling an extension?