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C++11 and Boost - Succinct like Python

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Re: C++11 and Boost - Succinct like Python

#21

Post by ygra »

daivd wrote: post #16
songgao wrote: post #12

Well, I liked C++11 a lot. But now I think I'll replace it with Go whenever possible. I don't really mind so much the verbose syntax. What matters is how difficult it is to write efficient code. I recently rewrote one of my C++ projects(which uses C++11 features and Boost.asio) in Go. It took me half the time, less than 2/3 lines of code compared to the C++ version. This is expected. But most surprisingly, despite th…

Go is certainly a fine language. One common instance where I would prefer C++, though, is when you are writing libraries for others to use. A language that runs on a VM can not easily be used as a library inside a language that uses another VM. You cannot easily write a library for Python in Go or vice versa. If you use a VM-less language like C or C++, your work can be used (through various wrappers, like SWIG or th…

Doesn't Go compile to machine code as well without a VM in between?

Re: C++11 and Boost - Succinct like Python

#22

Post by pyre »

ygra wrote: post #21
daivd wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go is certainly a fine language. One common instance where I would prefer C++, though, is when you are writing libraries for others to use. A language that runs on a VM can not easily be used as a library inside a language that uses another VM. You cannot easily write a library for Python in Go or vice versa. If you use a VM-less language like C or C++, your work can be used (through various wrappers, like SWIG or th…

Doesn't Go compile to machine code as well without a VM in between?

Go has garbage collection, which I think some people confuse with using a VM.

Re: C++11 and Boost - Succinct like Python

#26

Post by microtonal »

This post shows that C++11 is actually quite a comfortable language. Programming in C++98/03 was often a necessity for me (good for making performant cross-platform software), while I disliked the language quite a lot. The introduction of type inference, closures, range-based for loops, and uniform intialization makes many things that used to be tedious much simpler.

That said, I guess we have to live with C++03 for many more years. E.g. in one application that I co-developed, we use a library that can currently only be compiled without a substantial amount of effort on Visual Studio 2005 or 2008. The DLL compiled with older versions is not compatible with 2010 or 2012. So, we are basically stuck in 2005 or 2008 land for now.

Re: C++11 and Boost - Succinct like Python

#27

Post by Kurtz79 »

It's succint, all right (well, sort of).

But Python's major strength is readability, even more than coinciseness, or better, to provide both at the same time.

C was born as a terse language, sacrificing readability for coinciseness (the original examples in K&R are incredibly succint, almost elegant, but far from readable). I can't see many improvements in C++ (a language that arguably has worse coinciseness than C, without gaining in readability in the process)in that regards, even with the new version.

I work with C/C++ and I could easily understand a Python script even when I wasn't that familiar with the language, the same cannot be really said for that code in C++.

BTW, I'm not bashing C++, that has a lot going for it,just not readability and coinciseness.

Re: C++11 and Boost - Succinct like Python

#28

Post by alpatters »

daivd wrote: post #8
unwind wrote: post #2

Great post, it's always fun to see the cutting edge of C++ revealed. It's such a strange land. :) To me, this post would have been 10X more interesting if there was some elementary benchmarking included. If it's about the same speed as the corresponding Python code, which I'd bet is easier to write for more programmers, then I don't quite see the point being as clearly proven. If it's 100 times faster (or whatever),…

I wrote this post. The program is I/O-bound, so the only speed improvement comes from not having to start up the Python interpreter. If the task was CPU bound, you would get a great performance boost (sometimes 100x over CPython), but that is well known. There can be other reasons than performance for writing in C++. Used well, the strong static type system can catch many bugs. I suspect (but I cannot prove) that it…

I do both python and C++ in my job. They're both great at what they do IMO. Often, they are a good match for each other; several of the boost libs have been designed similarly to python equivalent. boost python also makes writing python extensions very easy.

For other reasons to write in C++ (or any static typed lang), I'd add type dispatching: calling different methods based on type. I also hate having a typo in a method name throwing at runtime.

I also often convert python implementations to C++, often using boost, usually for performance in one part of the code. You can quite often get the same implementation in a similar number of lines, especially since C++11 with boost.

Re: C++11 and Boost - Succinct like Python

#30

Post by daivd »

viraptor wrote: post #15
daivd wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You misunderstand the purpose of ord. The mp3 metadata uses one byte to encode an integer between 0 and 255, which represents genre. It is not a string.

I did misunderstand it. But then the first point is even stronger. Those two lines are definitely not as short/clean/readable as "str(ord(s[0]))"

I agree, it is much uglier. Part of it is that Python thinks a character is unsigned, whereas C++ thinks it is signed. This arbitrarily works in Python's favor here. Part of it is that Python just handles this better.
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