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3rd Edition of Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ by Stroustrup

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Re: 3rd Edition of Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ by Stroustrup

#101

Post by Jtsummers »

hedora wrote: post #42
hnthrowaway0328 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I just use C with classes, plus smart pointers and auto, for my emulator project(s), would that be a reasonably good approach? I once heard that the C++ language contains 4 components: the first catalog is "C", the second is for OOP, the third is for productivity and flexibility such as stl and templates, and the last one is for special cases such as volatile, asm, etc. He then recommends to use catalog 1 with car…

These days, OO programing is mostly frowned upon. OO added the idea of implementation inheritance to interfaces, and that's mostly a bad idea. Newer languages and modern C++ favor composition instead. You define interfaces that provide some well-defined capability, and then you write things that wrap the interfaces to provide additional functionality. In C++ you can use templates to do this without any runtime overhe…

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

Without having to squint, 12 of those languages are easily categorized as OO languages. Given the mindshare of those 12 languages, I don't think it makes sense to say that "OO programming is mostly frowned upon." [emphasis added] Maybe it's frowned upon by some, maybe even many, but if it's mostly frowned upon then a lot of people must hate their work.

Re: 3rd Edition of Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ by Stroustrup

#102

Post by AnimalMuppet »

hedora wrote: post #42
hnthrowaway0328 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I just use C with classes, plus smart pointers and auto, for my emulator project(s), would that be a reasonably good approach? I once heard that the C++ language contains 4 components: the first catalog is "C", the second is for OOP, the third is for productivity and flexibility such as stl and templates, and the last one is for special cases such as volatile, asm, etc. He then recommends to use catalog 1 with car…

These days, OO programing is mostly frowned upon. OO added the idea of implementation inheritance to interfaces, and that's mostly a bad idea. Newer languages and modern C++ favor composition instead. You define interfaces that provide some well-defined capability, and then you write things that wrap the interfaces to provide additional functionality. In C++ you can use templates to do this without any runtime overhe…

> These days, OO programing is mostly frowned upon.

Only in certain circles. For the software world as a whole, "mostly" is rather an overstatement. (For that matter, for the software world as a whole, "mostly" is an overstatement no matter what claim follows the "mostly".)

> OO added the idea of implementation inheritance to interfaces, and that's mostly a bad idea.

There is more than one flavor of OO. Not all of them support implementation inheritance. You're using a feature of a sub-part to complain about the whole. (In fairness, though, this is a thread about C++...)

Current best practice is "prefer composition over inheritance". There are places, though, where inheritance is the correct answer. When you hit those places, use it. Where it's not, don't use it.

Re: 3rd Edition of Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ by Stroustrup

#103

Post by tialaramex »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #64
hnthrowaway0328 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I just use C with classes, plus smart pointers and auto, for my emulator project(s), would that be a reasonably good approach? I once heard that the C++ language contains 4 components: the first catalog is "C", the second is for OOP, the third is for productivity and flexibility such as stl and templates, and the last one is for special cases such as volatile, asm, etc. He then recommends to use catalog 1 with car…

Yes, roughly so. 1) The major part of C to avoid is raw pointers and malloc, and generally anything where C++ has a more modern alternative. Don't use C datastructures (pointers, strings, arrays) where C++ replacements exist (smart pointers, std:string, std::array and std::vector, etc), or use C libraries where C++ replacements exist (e.g. C++ std::string vs C's string.h). Of course you can't avoid all of C, since th…

Although Microsoft refers to their implementation of the standard library as the STL (and this is convenient naming, since one of its most important maintainers is STL, Stephan T. Lavavej) actually the STL and the C++ standard library aren't the same thing.

The Standard Template Library is Alexander Stepanov's generic programming achieved via the relatively new (at the time) C++ Templates feature. At this point (the late 1980s through early 1990s) Generic Programming is an obscure academic idea, it's not how normal software works. Stepanov is persuaded to present his library to WG21 ("the committee") in 1993 and their work is eventually standardised as C++ 98 a few years later.

The most important part of the STL is the algorithms, generic algorithms are an amazing idea. The collections, eh, they're nothing to write home about, there are a dozen takes on the iterator problem with different trade-offs, but this idea of generic algorithms unlocks so much power and that's why lots of languages grew generics or for new languages had them on day one.

Re: 3rd Edition of Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ by Stroustrup

#104

Post by weinzierl »

gorjusborg wrote: post #58
01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not gp but I prefer rust to python and I'm itching to try that "just write your build scripts and stuff in rust too" Sure the builds are slow and Python _kinda_ has static typing, but rust just has a lot of stuff I like and it's practical to install and use natively without learning all the jargon like venvs and eggs and wheels and which package manager and package manager manager (rye?) to use this year I tried Pyth…

The idea of using Rust for scripting is bizaar. I can understand not wanting to use Python for everything, but I see the problem being the 'use it for everything' not the language choice. Use the tool that excels at the job. There is no language that is good at everything.

> The idea of using Rust for scripting is bizaar.

Not at all, I do the same.

Re: 3rd Edition of Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ by Stroustrup

#105

Post by winwang »

chuckadams wrote: post #60

Know what I like about Stroustrup's code? "using namespace std;". The typical convention of sticking std:: in front of std::every std::last std::bloody std::thing drives me std::insane.

Yep, although I do like not having clashing names.

But I mean... somehow every other language solved this.

Re: 3rd Edition of Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ by Stroustrup

#106

Post by forgotpwd16 »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #89
tejohnso wrote: post #37

Oh, he switched to QT for the GUI chapter. That's a significant change from FLTK. Should be well received as QT is popular in industry. Not sure how the learning curve will be affected.

All of the 4 AI coding assistants I've tried (claude3, gemini, gpt4, deepseek) used SFML for graphics when I asked them to code boids and game of life in C++. I'm wondering if that's because it's cross platform or that there's more code out there using SFML that these models got trained on? SFML seems relatively recent compared to Qt or even FLTK, so it seems kind of odd that there would be more SFML training data. I…

SFML is a graphical library but not a GUI framework/toolkit that Qt/FLTK are.

Re: 3rd Edition of Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ by Stroustrup

#107

Post by weinzierl »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #95
natsucks wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust is cool now. Python is not cool anymore.

Having to use the wrong tool is not cool, ever. So I don't care how cool Rust is right now, I still am not going to use it for scripting.

Have you tried it? How would you know that Rust is the wrong tool.

I'm indifferent when it comes to Python vs Rust for scripting, but I'd take Rust over a shell script (of any variety) any day.

Re: 3rd Edition of Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ by Stroustrup

#108

Post by DrBazza »

REDS1736 wrote: post #32
KptMarchewa wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just wish to _not_ work with Python.

Why is that? I'm genuinely curious. Also, what languages / environments do you prefer?

Any non-trivial python is indistinguishable from magic.

Re: 3rd Edition of Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ by Stroustrup

#109

Post by tialaramex »

slekker wrote: post #93
tialaramex wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So you will need to know C++ if we want to be the cutting edge and need extreme performance. I would suggest a better phrasing might be that you should learn C++ if you want to cling to existing software in the state it is today, certain that history ended yesterday and the future is just the same forever from here on. You won't get "extreme performance" from C++ because it is buried under the weight of decades of…

A more extreme version of this would be COBOL right? Even if people stopped writing C++ today the amount of code that's already written will last many lifetimes.

Sure, I do not advise people to go learn COBOL either. In fact, I never learned COBOL, they were writing COBOL at the first place I "worked" as a teenager† and it was clearly not the future.

† in the UK there was a discrepancy between what happens to the sort of teenager who exhibits talent and interest in an area like writing software, who is sent to just watch adults doing that and mostly doesn't do any actual work themselves as "Work Shadowing", versus those whose direction seems more... manual who are expected to actually go do stuff in the same period, supervised by adults of course, but still very much doing the actual work, "Work Experience". This seems very obviously unfair, although of course as the teenager who wasn't expected to actually do much I wasn't complaining at the time...

Re: 3rd Edition of Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ by Stroustrup

#110

Post by spacechild1 »

earthnail wrote: post #83
spacechild1 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you are trying to say here. Qt, the library, and QtCreator, the IDE, are completely separate products. You can use QtCreator without Qt and vice versa. Now, I'm pretty sure you know that, hence my confusion...

QtCreator helps with the learning curve as it‘s a very accessible IDE. One of the first IDEs I used in my career.

Sure, QtCreator is nice and it's actually my IDE of choice. I just wanted to point out that it is independent of Qt, the library.
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