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Does C++ still deserve a bad rap?

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Re: Does C++ still deserve a bad rap?

#111

Post by pooya13 »

beyondCritics wrote: post #64
flowerlad wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Implicit type conversions are inherited from C, the language you called "awesome". It is true that C language has some very limited implicit type conversions. For example you can say: long n = 3; And the integer 3 is converted to long. This is extremely limited, and does not make the program hard to understand, which is completely different from the craziness you see in C++.

C does destructive conversions automatically, if you ask for it. E.g. unsigned n; n = 2.99; // n = 2 n = -1; // n = 2^M-1; n = 1.0E33; // undefined but not catched Both C and C++ follow the same philosopy: "Trust the programmer". The programmer is expected to use his expressive freedom, to solve performance problems and stay away from problematic constructs without being told to so. C is a systems programming languag…

> Both C and C++ follow the same philosopy: "Trust the programmer"

I disagree. I think ever since it’s inception from C, C++ has tried to increase type safety and continuously move more of the work to the compiler (latest example is concepts). It does empower the programmer to do what they want: OOP, FP, GP...

The philosophy of the language is mostly about abstractions. Abstracting objects, types, resource management etc And using modern C++ features and a recent compiler makes it harder to make mistakes. Using some generally accepted guidelines and static analysis tools helps even further.

Though the syntax is at times ugly due to the age of the language and it has a lot of inertia that makes it hard to get rid of some bad design decisions like some of the defaults, unless someone recreates c++ with the same flexibility and power, and the same powerful compilers/tools but with better syntax and defaults I don’t see the language going anywhere. And I am not holding my breath for another language to quickly be able to reproduce the C++ echo system that have taken decades to develop.

Re: Does C++ still deserve a bad rap?

#113

Post by barumi »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #103
barumi wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but a lot of primitive stuff in languages like python is also just C calls and may be optimised to the point of being faster That assertion makes zero sense if we take into account that parallelization is one of the most basic performance techniques there is, and Python's GIL simply eliminates that option except for multi-process applications which then require serializing stuff back and forth. Python is pretty muc…

The overwhelming majority of C extensions release the Python GIL during calls to them. If you're in the situation described in the parent comment then you can parallelize just fine using threads.

> The overwhelming majority of C extensions release the Python GIL during calls to them.

In that corner case you still have slow Python glue code calling fast C++ code.

It makes no sense to claim that Python is performant based on the idea that it may be used to glue together calls to performant C++ code, while ignoring the fact that not only Python forces performance restrictions on it's code but also that C++ code is quite capable of calling performant C++ code itself.

Re: Does C++ still deserve a bad rap?

#114

Post by josefx »

dmortin wrote: post #95
josefx wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There isn't any point of using C++ to count words in a text file. Any high-level language like Python will beat you to it. People using c++ usually care about programs finishing before the heat death of the universe. I had a few Python scripts that spend several seconds parsing larger files, after a rewrite to c++ that changed to almost instant.

> I had a few Python scripts that spend several seconds parsing larger files, after a rewrite to c++ that changed to almost instant. It depends on the task. If the parsing is done once a day then several seconds is nothing, so there is no point in using C++. If the parser is running very frequently then of course one uses a faster implementation.

In my case it lead to a reverse on that reasoning. The script ended up being an explicit step to import the data when it changed instead of running implicitly whenever the data was needed. Of course that choice was based on the initial version which was even slower and didn't use multiprocessing to handle the files in parallel.

Re: Does C++ still deserve a bad rap?

#115

Post by noctune »

john_moscow wrote: post #20

Like every programming language out there, C++ is a tool. And like every tool out there it has its uses. There isn't any point of using C++ to count words in a text file. Any high-level language like Python will beat you to it. However, there's one thing you can do in C++ and not in Python or JavaScript or PHP: fully control the memory layout of your data. While you don't need it in most of the cases, it becomes a ki…

> * Try implementing an on-disk hash table in Python and you're stuck manually packing ints and longs in an out of arrays. In C++ it could a simple template used with a memory-mapped file.

This is only simpler if you don't need to handle read failures. If you want to handle read failures, memory mapping can quickly become way more complicated. You have to install signal handlers and do a complicated dance to correctly handle not having data in some range.

Re: Does C++ still deserve a bad rap?

#116

Post by mhh__ »

spaetzleesser wrote: post #68
mehrdadn wrote: post #2

I say this with a lot of love for C++, and I think it has gotten much better, but just try splitting a string via another string as the delimiter...

To be fair this is not a problem of the language but a library problem.

And the fact that libraries are still a pain point in C++ is a language problem.

Re: Does C++ still deserve a bad rap?

#117

Post by winrid »

nendroid wrote: post #93
wirthjason wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There isn't any point of using C++ to count words in a text file. Any high-level language like Python will beat you to it. However, there's one thing you can do in C++ and not in Python or JavaScript or PHP: fully control the memory layout of your data. Any books or resources for digging deeper in these kinds of topics? I’m a Python developer and would like to learn C++ but the just the reasons you mentioned make i…

Python developer here just switched jobs to one that does C++. Let me warn you right now. It's not worth it. At all. Don't go down this path. Memory management is easy, but that's not the only crap you have to deal with. Templating and the whole C++ ecosystem with Cmake compiling to make is a giant headache. It takes about a week to integrate a new C++ library in source code and people are worried about installing or…

Why not just fuzz the library if that's a concern?

Re: Does C++ still deserve a bad rap?

#118

Post by mhh__ »

oscargrouch wrote: post #9
mehrdadn wrote: post #2

I say this with a lot of love for C++, and I think it has gotten much better, but just try splitting a string via another string as the delimiter...

Is there any language where string handling doesn't suck? (No script languages please, because they cheat by implementing the hard things on C or C++) From memory the less horrible experience i had was with Go, but there's help for the slices on the runtime which let the difficult parts hidden and also the batteries-included std library, which is one of the most well designed standard libraries out there. Buffer mana…

Strings in D are pretty nice, along with the extremely expressive range algorithms.

Unicode is a slight pain (it's explicitly supported and works fine but it was designed before UTF8 dominated so there's baggage)

Re: Does C++ still deserve a bad rap?

#119

Post by mhh__ »

creato wrote: post #5

I don't think C++ ever really had a bad rap except among ideologues and evangelists of other languages. In my experience, people like this are very rare in the real world outside of maybe Rust conferences.

Equally, a lot of people just don't know any different.

How would you know C++ isn't optimal if you've never tried or thought about anything else.

That and the sunk-cost of learning C++ is large.

Re: Does C++ still deserve a bad rap?

#120

Post by golergka »

berkut wrote: post #96
golergka wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't C be a better fit for these tasks?

Given people (including in these comments about string splitting) often complain about C++ not having "batteries included" for everything, surely C would be even worse in that regard...

Personally, I think that the reason for these complaints is that C++ tries to look like a "batteries included" language that is suitable for tasks that high-level languages are typically used for, and falls short. C, on the other hand, is pretty obviously low-level. C is honest in what it is and what expectations you can have from it. It won't tempt you to rewrite your whole business logic with it — instead, you would write a small library or service, that would only take care of the memory and CPU intensive task that you need it for, and leave the rest of business logic written in language that really suits it.
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