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The Design of C++ (1994) [video]

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Re: The Design of C++ (1994) [video]

#11

Post by hga »

profeta wrote: post #6
hga wrote: post #3

Even if you dislike C++, or like me, came to loathe it, I highly recommend the book he published in the same year, The Design and Evolution of C++ ( https://www.amazon.com/Design-Evolution-C-Bjarne-Stroustrup/... ). It's very educational about you go about making a successful language in an existing ecosystem, and even after swearing off the language I don't regret one bit the time I spent reading the book.

how can you loathe C++ without caming to loathe it? i mean, everyone is bound to hate it, but you have to try it first to be sure...

I think it's flaws, only somewhat addressed in recent revisions, are better known now than they were in the mid-'90s when I learned and started using it, plus the industry wide ... obsession? with OO and especially class based OO has subsided. So someone with good taste who reads and trusts what he reads of these details could, yeah, probably not legitimately loathe it, but at least decide without using it that it wasn't for him.

I changed the initial use of loathe in this context to dislike, thanks for pointing that out.

Re: The Design of C++ (1994) [video]

#12

Post by ArkyBeagle »

profeta wrote: post #6
hga wrote: post #3

Even if you dislike C++, or like me, came to loathe it, I highly recommend the book he published in the same year, The Design and Evolution of C++ ( https://www.amazon.com/Design-Evolution-C-Bjarne-Stroustrup/... ). It's very educational about you go about making a successful language in an existing ecosystem, and even after swearing off the language I don't regret one bit the time I spent reading the book.

how can you loathe C++ without caming to loathe it? i mean, everyone is bound to hate it, but you have to try it first to be sure...

Just don't assume loathing is linear...

Re: The Design of C++ (1994) [video]

#13

Post by ArkyBeagle »

hga wrote: post #3

Even if you dislike C++, or like me, came to loathe it, I highly recommend the book he published in the same year, The Design and Evolution of C++ ( https://www.amazon.com/Design-Evolution-C-Bjarne-Stroustrup/... ). It's very educational about you go about making a successful language in an existing ecosystem, and even after swearing off the language I don't regret one bit the time I spent reading the book.

The sort of puppy-dog C++ style on Arduinos - a sort of pedomorphic variation on "'C' with classes", chock full of singletons and the inability of constructors to operate unless they're called in A Certain Place - pretty much works.

What's less attractive is Dogmatic Bikeshedding C++ OO Fundamentalism.

Re: The Design of C++ (1994) [video]

#14

Post by mlvljr »

ArkyBeagle wrote: post #13
hga wrote: post #3

Even if you dislike C++, or like me, came to loathe it, I highly recommend the book he published in the same year, The Design and Evolution of C++ ( https://www.amazon.com/Design-Evolution-C-Bjarne-Stroustrup/... ). It's very educational about you go about making a successful language in an existing ecosystem, and even after swearing off the language I don't regret one bit the time I spent reading the book.

The sort of puppy-dog C++ style on Arduinos - a sort of pedomorphic variation on "'C' with classes", chock full of singletons and the inability of constructors to operate unless they're called in A Certain Place - pretty much works. What's less attractive is Dogmatic Bikeshedding C++ OO Fundamentalism.

Behave yourself! How dare...

Re: The Design of C++ (1994) [video]

#15

Post by mlvljr »

armitron wrote: post #9
profeta wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how can you loathe C++ without caming to loathe it? i mean, everyone is bound to hate it, but you have to try it first to be sure...

How can you loathe Krokodil without coming to loathe it? You have to try it first to be sure...

Russky drug addicts on HN? :V

Re: The Design of C++ (1994) [video]

#16

Post by byuu »

hga wrote: post #3

Even if you dislike C++, or like me, came to loathe it, I highly recommend the book he published in the same year, The Design and Evolution of C++ ( https://www.amazon.com/Design-Evolution-C-Bjarne-Stroustrup/... ). It's very educational about you go about making a successful language in an existing ecosystem, and even after swearing off the language I don't regret one bit the time I spent reading the book.

After seeing P0145R3 on C++17 refinements to expression order guarantees (and many things like that before it) ... I think I've finally started to actively dislike C++ now as well, after nearly 20 years of using it daily.

They had a golden opportunity to fix it, but even with C++17 and the expression "a(b(), c());", it is still left indeterminate whether b() or c() will be invoked first. Even between calls in the same program! So what if they have side effects? It might be a picosecond faster if the compiler can run c() first to push its argument onto the stack first!

I'm all for the power for C and C++ to optimize to such efficient code, and not consume many resources. But we're a long ways from the PDP-11 days and processor frequencies measured in KHz, and compiler developers are living in some alternate reality where the only thing that matters are benchmarks, and they'll happily undermine the stability and security of our software by doing things like erasing that call to memset() that cleared your private key from memory; or remove that conditional expression entirely because it detected the possibility of an integer overflow, so that means it can do whatever it wants! ... even though the world has been twos-complement for decades now.

Given the very real security concerns and exploits we keep seeing in code ... I don't believe that using languages full of undefined/unspecified behavior is the way to build stable and reliable systems.

Nobody can keep track of the hundreds of UB cases in C/C++. We all do it, and then suddenly a new GCC comes out with a new benchmark optimization, and now our programs are misbehaving.

I'm willing to pay a 5-10% penalty, and give up compatibility with the Motorola 68000 platform, to get well-defined and predictable behavior. Maybe you keep C/C++ for that gaming OS, or that Wall Street trading system. But on my server? I can spare the CPU cycles.

And yet, everything is built on C/C++. Your OS? That Python interpreter? Your web browser's Javascript engine? The .NET runtime? All C/C++ under the hood. We're building on quicksand; when we need a solid foundation.

Re: The Design of C++ (1994) [video]

#17

Post by Koshkin »

The language may seem complex to some, but so does math. It is the single most powerful programming tool the world has ever known. Sure, it may be hard to see that it is beautiful, but that is so only because it is a product of both intelligent design and evolution. The language structure is extremely logical, and there is very little that could be changed in it without the danger of destroying its finely tuned fabric built from intricately interacting concepts and mechanisms. In that, it is radically different from the multitude of "pure" programming languages, some also of a respectable age, and it is because of that, unlike those languages, it became, and has been for over a quarter of century, the single most important programming language. Some may say: yes, clearly, this language is borne from good intentions, but are not these the good intentions that pave the road to hell? To that I have only one thing to say: this is where you go looking for good company :)

Re: The Design of C++ (1994) [video]

#18

Post by netheril96 »

byuu wrote: post #16
hga wrote: post #3

Even if you dislike C++, or like me, came to loathe it, I highly recommend the book he published in the same year, The Design and Evolution of C++ ( https://www.amazon.com/Design-Evolution-C-Bjarne-Stroustrup/... ). It's very educational about you go about making a successful language in an existing ecosystem, and even after swearing off the language I don't regret one bit the time I spent reading the book.

After seeing P0145R3 on C++17 refinements to expression order guarantees (and many things like that before it) ... I think I've finally started to actively dislike C++ now as well, after nearly 20 years of using it daily. They had a golden opportunity to fix it, but even with C++17 and the expression "a(b(), c());", it is still left indeterminate whether b() or c() will be invoked first. Even between calls in the sam…

The standards body move very slowly. More practical approach is to push compilers to add more options to define undefined behavior so that we have safety with the minor cost of performance. We already have -fwrapv, -ftrapv and -fno-strict-aliasing. We could ask for more and a general -fsafe flag.

Re: The Design of C++ (1994) [video]

#19

Post by santaclaus »

ArkyBeagle wrote: post #13
hga wrote: post #3

Even if you dislike C++, or like me, came to loathe it, I highly recommend the book he published in the same year, The Design and Evolution of C++ ( https://www.amazon.com/Design-Evolution-C-Bjarne-Stroustrup/... ). It's very educational about you go about making a successful language in an existing ecosystem, and even after swearing off the language I don't regret one bit the time I spent reading the book.

The sort of puppy-dog C++ style on Arduinos - a sort of pedomorphic variation on "'C' with classes", chock full of singletons and the inability of constructors to operate unless they're called in A Certain Place - pretty much works. What's less attractive is Dogmatic Bikeshedding C++ OO Fundamentalism.

> What's less attractive is Dogmatic Bikeshedding C++ OO Fundamentalism.

Is that a thing? I always saw more of that in the Java world than C++ -- Java's standard library is rife with the singleton factory decorator monstrosities that have come to be associated with OO, C++ and the standard library have always felt more generic-programy. Now egregious use of obscure template meta programming tricks because of perceived (vs measured) performance gains, I've seen some horrors there...

Re: The Design of C++ (1994) [video]

#20

Post by vvanders »

byuu wrote: post #16
hga wrote: post #3

Even if you dislike C++, or like me, came to loathe it, I highly recommend the book he published in the same year, The Design and Evolution of C++ ( https://www.amazon.com/Design-Evolution-C-Bjarne-Stroustrup/... ). It's very educational about you go about making a successful language in an existing ecosystem, and even after swearing off the language I don't regret one bit the time I spent reading the book.

After seeing P0145R3 on C++17 refinements to expression order guarantees (and many things like that before it) ... I think I've finally started to actively dislike C++ now as well, after nearly 20 years of using it daily. They had a golden opportunity to fix it, but even with C++17 and the expression "a(b(), c());", it is still left indeterminate whether b() or c() will be invoked first. Even between calls in the sam…

> I'm willing to pay a 5-10% penalty, and give up compatibility with the Motorola 68000 platform, to get well-defined and predictable behavior. Maybe you keep C/C++ for that gaming OS, or that Wall Street trading system. But on my server? I can spare the CPU cycles.

Come over to the land of Rust, where you can keep your high performance memory semantics and safety :).

Seriously, life-long C++ dev here. Been writing C++ for almost 20 years now and I don't feel like there's anything I could do in C++ that I can't in Rust(both performance and functionality-wise).

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