181–190 of 310 posts
CMake helps, but the fact that it's been around for 20+ years, and is still the best tool of it's kind, is food for thought.
“There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” Bjarne Stroustrup
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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?
If I want a library in python it takes about a second to install with one command, and these libraries tend to be safe so you're not going to get any resistance if you want to try out 10 libraries in the next hour or so, which is sort of impossible with c++. Also these libraries are easily uninstalled and isolated from other python apps you have. No need to use massively complex package managers like nix to handle isolation.
Fuzzing a library just isn't something that's done in python. The developer just installs it and manually tests it 5 or 6 times in a shell and it's part of the ecosystem in 5 minutes.
If you accidentally leave unused libraries in your code and it gets pushed to prod it's a non-issue.
I switched to c++ because I was ok with the verbosity and also the complexity and also dealing with memory. But literally every single corner of the c++ ecosystem is a pain in the ass to work with. It's getting to the point where I'm just annoyed all the time. If you want high performance apps go with rust or golang. C++ is just not worth it.
For a C++ dev moving to python is like night and day. Imagine a programming environment where you only have to deal with the intention of what your app should do and not all the yak shaving that comes with it on the side. I know some and they tell me they would never go back to c++.
I have nothing against C++ per se. Used it on and off for 10 years (but most actively 3). It's a fine language. To me using C++ means you are ready to give up a lot of time and energy in order to gain a complete control over certain aspects of your program. I was very much into that at the start of my career and gradually started drifting away to more immediate productivity while reserving the right to poke under the…
I used to work with C++ almost exclusively, but accepted to use more interactive languages for most of my work mostly for faster iteration. C++ is definitely not my main choice anymore, but still use it daily. C++ has pretty much unmatched tooling due to the massive ecosystem. I have my own long list of gripes against it's syntax and historical baggage, however it's a language that doesn't really impose a style/idiom…
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> 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…
you can malloc() to get a memory range, or mmap() to get a disk-backed memory range with kernel-managed paging, and then you can do whatever you want with it. You get a pointer to the start of the range, and you know how large it is, so from there it's just pointer arithmetic and assignment. Easy peasy. Now you just have to make sure that you zero data when you're done with it, track how much of that memory is availa…
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> 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 language has some very limited implicit type conversions What? C will happily compile this: void g() { float f = 3.14; int* ip = &f; } C++ has no such _craziness_. Your strawman actually has pretty good uses: complex c = 3i; ... = c + 4; Would you rather have the last line not compile because 4 is not a complex number? Because one _could_ argue that 4 is a complex number, and C++ can represent this with an implic…
Only if you ignore your compiler output: Even TinyCC will warn about that one on default settings. With the flags I use, the code would in fact fail to compile.
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…
This fragility is not at all obvious in the code. It is easy to imagine someone making that kind of change to word_regex and introducing a theoretical security bug that no compiler or static checker is going to pick up (AFAIK). Of course the severity of the bug in practice depends on what std::tolower does in that undefined-behavior situation (which may depend on the run-time locale setting).
I think the author's example actually illustrates the C++ safety problem pretty well. You write a program that looks safe and actually is safe, but slightly different code which looks just as safe is not. You're tiptoeing through a minefield.
C++ fills a niche and probably if you use it all on your own you don't even see the problems. But if you use it at scale with multiple developers you can see it's layers of leaky abstraction laid down since the 80s that can never really be cleaned because too much is built on this foundation. This slightly over 100 page book on move semantics https://leanpub.com/cppmove shows some of the iceberg like complexities dot…
> This slightly over 100 page book on move semantics https://leanpub.com/cppmove shows some of the iceberg like complexities dotted all over the place. Some developers probably never use and have never even heard of move semantics. I think Scott Meyers' "Effective Modern C++" which is in large part a collection of caveats and description of things which don't fit always together also underlines that impression: https…
Ended the book in a pessimistic tone. It looked more like a cookbook of pitfalls _everywhere_.
Every new feature looked exciting, but came with a list of cases where the language decides to leave you on your own when it gets too uncomfortable (the "well that's undefined behaviour, I'm sorry, you suck! bye!" escape hatch). So in the end it's like you said: a new list of gotchas to learn by heart.