Ask HN: I whant to Learn C++ not Rust!!

I don't want to discourage you, and I think everything I did during this time was a good experience and taught me a lot. If you feel that's important for you, go ahead.

My point of view, which comes from my personal experience: even though Rust has some limitations, a number of areas for further development and a few rough edges for lower-level development, at this point in my career I don't want to touch C++ anymore unless I have no other choice.

Modern C++ is much better but it is not a paradigm shift (safe by default), the same way "labelled goto" (ie, C) is better than "numbered goto" (ie, BASIC) but it is still not a while/for.

You might reach a similar conclusion, or you might not. I just want to leave this here for you to reflect upon.

Regarding material, it all depends on the platform and what you would want to use C++ for. There are many references here already, so my advice goes to focus on C++ concepts and techniques and not too much on specific libraries - since they can be unavailable or impractical for certain environments/platforms.

CMake/autotools syntax is nothing like C/C++, or actually any general purpose programming language, so you basically need to become familiar with this new language/paradigm in addition to knowing C/C++.

But like with most programming languages, once you grok it you will more easily learn other build systems. They all solve similar problems after all.

You just gotta pick one and learn it. I mean, you don't have to, you can write your own build scripts in bash or whatever but eventually you'll just end up inventing a new, probably crappy build system :)

> really hard for me to read and understand.

I agree and empathize. I tried figuring them out by looking at other people's Makefiles but they are all so wildly different between projects, it's like there is no standard/convention to writing them (and there is not as far as I can tell). Additionally, make has so much magic/internal/inferred/assumed behavior, variables etc. that it's really hard to figure out what they do by just reading them. Especially since they don't use familiar flow control structures like functions calls or even gotos. This also makes debugging hard.

I only learned make when I've started writing my own C/C++ projects. The documentation is actually quite good. Going from make to CMake was much easier then.

What would you use now?