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Why C++ is vastly superior to C

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Re: Why C++ is vastly superior to C

#41

Post by toadstone »

dfox wrote: post #15
CountHackulus wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great job measuring initialization time, now how about showing real world performance differences in actual large programs.

It is not about initialization time or even run-time performance, but about speed of compilation. When any non-trivial program in C++ takes minutes to build even on high end workstation all benefits that might come from it's "high level" features are moot.

Are you really saying that the time and energy you save coding and debugging by using high level features aren't worth a few minutes of compile time? It won't even be a few minutes except for the first time because of separate compilation.

Re: Why C++ is vastly superior to C

#42

Post by toadstone »

westi wrote: post #5
ColinWright wrote: post #2

For some things, C++ is better than C. For some things Lisp is better than either, and for yet other things, Python is better than them all. Why are people so insistent on declaring their view is absolutely right, with no arguments, everyone else is wrong, and that one language will rule them all? Trust me. For some things I do, C is vastly superior to C++, but I'm not going to try to convince everyone that C is bett…

Indeed. This article is more "why C++ makes this particular program easier to write" and is in no way any proof that C++ is better than C.

On the other hand, I don't think I've ever written a program that doesn't use containers, manage memory, and handle errors.

Re: Why C++ is vastly superior to C

#43

Post by mnutt »

implicit wrote: post #39
vixeria wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are some of these C++ features that interact in unpredictable ways? Just curious.

Implicit conversions come to mind. They don't need to interact with anything to be confusing. Consider this program: #include using std::cout; using std::endl; struct C { int x; C(int _x) : x(_x) {} operator bool() const { return 0 != x; } }; struct D { float f; D(float _f) : f(_f) {} operator bool() const { return 0.0f != f; } }; int main() { C c(9); D d(2.0f); if (c == d) { cout g++ 3.4.4 doesn't so much as warn th…

Maybe it's just coming from a dynamic language, but it appears that you've overridden the bool operators to always return true. (except when you pass in 0 and 0.0) If you redefine how two structs of different kinds are compared, who is the compiler to say it's a problem?

Re: Why C++ is vastly superior to C

#44

Post by toadstone »

olavk wrote: post #29
ColinWright wrote: post #2

For some things, C++ is better than C. For some things Lisp is better than either, and for yet other things, Python is better than them all. Why are people so insistent on declaring their view is absolutely right, with no arguments, everyone else is wrong, and that one language will rule them all? Trust me. For some things I do, C is vastly superior to C++, but I'm not going to try to convince everyone that C is bett…

I think much language criticism miss the non-technical context which influences which language is the best tool for the job. We are good at providing technical arguments (Erlang is fun if you need concurrency, C is cool if you need to get close to the metal), but there are important non-technical issues. Things like: How many people is on the team who have to work on the code? How big is the turnover among the develo…

I think you know you've cracked when you prefer bad C# to clean Haskell.

Re: Why C++ is vastly superior to C

#45

Post by jergosh »

toadstone wrote: post #41
dfox wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not about initialization time or even run-time performance, but about speed of compilation. When any non-trivial program in C++ takes minutes to build even on high end workstation all benefits that might come from it's "high level" features are moot.

Are you really saying that the time and energy you save coding and debugging by using high level features aren't worth a few minutes of compile time? It won't even be a few minutes except for the first time because of separate compilation.

Except when you use templates.

Re: Why C++ is vastly superior to C

#46

Post by Freaky »

AshleysBrain wrote: post #19

Apart from "use the right tool for the job", I always did wonder how C programmers cope without the STL containers: std::vector, std::list, std::set, std::map etc. Sometimes I need to map a string to a list of numbers. std::map >. Done. All memory allocation taken care of for you as well - nothing to leak. In C, how do you get by? You either have to reinvent a red-black tree each time you want that, or use some kind…

If you don't like macros (which are used quite a lot for this sort of thing - e.g. http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/sys/queue.h), void pointers and function pointers go a long way too. Nobody's writing red-black trees from scratch for every project, really.

Re: Why C++ is vastly superior to C

#47

Post by microtonal »

As usual, use the right tool for the job. Personally, I use C++ mostly, for different reasons:

- There are some very good cross-platform toolkits available for C++ (such as Qt).

- There is no C99 support in Visual Studio. At the same time, C++-98 works across all major compilers these days.

- STL containers.

However, C++ just is the best choice for the projects I am currently working on. For other projects, with fewer dependencies and no portability requirements beyond Unixy environments I prefer C.

Nearly any language can be superior, depending on the project. The linked article attempts to show that C++ is superior based on some specific situations where this may indeed be the case.

Re: Why C++ is vastly superior to C

#48

Post by tree_of_item »

toadstone wrote: post #44
olavk wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think much language criticism miss the non-technical context which influences which language is the best tool for the job. We are good at providing technical arguments (Erlang is fun if you need concurrency, C is cool if you need to get close to the metal), but there are important non-technical issues. Things like: How many people is on the team who have to work on the code? How big is the turnover among the develo…

I think you know you've cracked when you prefer bad C# to clean Haskell.

Bad C# over bad Haskell, I think.

Re: Why C++ is vastly superior to C

#49

Post by dfox »

toadstone wrote: post #41
dfox wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not about initialization time or even run-time performance, but about speed of compilation. When any non-trivial program in C++ takes minutes to build even on high end workstation all benefits that might come from it's "high level" features are moot.

Are you really saying that the time and energy you save coding and debugging by using high level features aren't worth a few minutes of compile time? It won't even be a few minutes except for the first time because of separate compilation.

That is exactly what I'm saying.

Compilation of C++ is really surprisingly slow. Mostly because compilation of modern C++ code involves parsing tens of megabytes of headers that mostly use complex to analyze constructs. Fact that C++'s grammar and semantics are incredibly complex does not help fast compilation either.

Separate compilation does not solve it much, because many simple changes, that affects only one file in other languages, force you to recompile significant subset of your codebase.

While you may save time coding I don't believe that debugging C++ code is in way easier than C code, I think it is quite the reverse. While you mostly eliminate some problems by using C++ you get whole lot of other C++ specific problems (static initializers, unexpected effects of overload resolution, unexpected effects of automatically generated code, weird performance characteristics...).

Most of this can be worked around, but in that cases you end up using subset of C++ that could be more flexibly implemented on top of C as few hundred lines of preprocessor macros and some coding conventions than by it's own compiler.

Re: Why C++ is vastly superior to C

#50

Post by olavk »

toadstone wrote: post #44
olavk wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think much language criticism miss the non-technical context which influences which language is the best tool for the job. We are good at providing technical arguments (Erlang is fun if you need concurrency, C is cool if you need to get close to the metal), but there are important non-technical issues. Things like: How many people is on the team who have to work on the code? How big is the turnover among the develo…

I think you know you've cracked when you prefer bad C# to clean Haskell.

Edited to be less ambiguous :)
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