Comment by lelanthran
12 hours ago
> C23 + <compiler C extensions> is hardly simpler as people advocate.
Well, certainly simpler than C++, at any rate.
I mean, just knowing the assignment rules in C++ is worthy of an entire book on its own. Understandably, the single rule of "assignment is a bitwise copy of the source variable into the destination variable" is inflexible, but at least the person reading the local code can, just from the current scope, determine whether some assignment is a bug or not!
In many ways, C++ requires global context when reading any local scope: will the correct destructor get called? Can this variable be used as an argument to a function (a lack of a copy constructor results in the bitwise copy for on stack, with the destructor for that instance running twice - once in the stack and again when the scope ends)? Is this being passed by reference (i.e. it might be modified by the function we are calling) or by value (i.e. we don't need to worry about whether `bar` has been changed after a call to `foo(bar)`).
Many programmers don't like holding lots of global scope in their head when working in some local scope. In C, all those examples above are clear in the local scope.
All programmers who prefer C over C++ have already tried C++ in large and non-trivial projects before walking away. I doubt that the reverse is true.
Where do you think the first generations from C++ programmers come from?
There is this urban myth C is simple, from folks that never read either ISO C manual, can't read legalese, never spent much time browsing the compiler reference manual.
Mostly learnt K&R C, assume the world is simple, until the code gets ported into another platform or compiler.
Yet in such a simple language, I keep waiting to meet the magical developer that never wrote memory corruption errors with pointer arithmetic, string and memory library functions.
> There is this urban myth C is simple, from folks that never read either ISO C manual, can't read legalese, never spent much time browsing the compiler reference manual.
And yet you know from previous discussion with folks like Uecker and myself have done all those things, and still walked away from C++.
In my case, I stepped back even after having a decade of work experience in it. Anything needing more abstraction than C, C++ is not going to be a good fit anyway (there's better languages).
> Yet in such a simple language, I keep waiting to meet the magical developer that never wrote memory corruption errors with pointer arithmetic, string and memory library functions.
Who made that claim? This sounds like a strawman - "If you use C you'll never make this class of errors", which no one said in this conversation.
In any case, the point is even more true of C++ - I have yet to meet this magical C++ programmer that never hits the few dozens of footguns it has that C doesn't.
People that contribute to WG14 are naturally biased against C++, especially with gimmicks like _Generic.
Internet is full of people asserting CVEs in C are only caused by not skilled enough devs.
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