Comment by pjmlp
16 hours ago
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.
> Internet is full of people asserting CVEs in C are only caused by not skilled enough devs.
Sure, but those people are not here, and usually aren't on HN anyway.
The internet is also full of people asserting that CVEs in C++ are only caused by not skilled enough devs, but I consider those people irrelevant too.
The reasons for rejecting C++ in this forum have been repeated often enough that you should have seen them by now: C++ has major systemic problems that don't exist in many other languages, including C.
It should be no surprise to you, at this point, that people choose almost anything over C++. The fact that "anything" also includes "C" is mostly incidental.
No one is asserting that they reject C++ because C is better, they typically reject it for concrete reasons, like the ones I pointed out upthread.
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