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C++: The Documentary

herbsutter.com

161–170 of 334 posts

Re: C++: The Documentary

#161

So happy to see Andrei Alexandrescu was included in this documentary. His book on modern C++ design was a mind opener at the time I read it. Maybe still is today. Anybody else read it?

Agreed, _Modern C++ Design_ is probably the programming book I've gotten the most out of in my career.

Re: C++: The Documentary

#162
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find C++ not hard at all when working with familiar idioms, restrictions and toolings (familiar to me). But it's hard jumping into new codebases and adjusting yourself to new patterns. Recently I did a lot of programming using C++23 Modules and it was a breeze. There's basically dozens of very nice languages inside C++. That can be a blessing or a curse. I'm anxious for Herb Sutter's CPP2/CPPFront to become a stand…

>I'm anxious for Herb Sutter's CPP2/CPPFront to become a standard. Why? It doesn't remove complexity, it (partially) hides it and makes the whole thing even more complex.

I enjoy the syntax and the defaults he picked, and it matches the way I use C++. I prefer it to all the C/C++ alternatives.

Re: C++: The Documentary

#163

So happy to see Andrei Alexandrescu was included in this documentary. His book on modern C++ design was a mind opener at the time I read it. Maybe still is today. Anybody else read it?

His talks are some of my favorites; he's a great speaker. Very engaging and has a great sense of humor, which he uses to great effect.

Re: C++: The Documentary

#164
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find C++ not hard at all when working with familiar idioms, restrictions and toolings (familiar to me). But it's hard jumping into new codebases and adjusting yourself to new patterns. Recently I did a lot of programming using C++23 Modules and it was a breeze. There's basically dozens of very nice languages inside C++. That can be a blessing or a curse. I'm anxious for Herb Sutter's CPP2/CPPFront to become a stand…

What type of project actually uses C++ 23 modules in real life? What kind of toolchain enables that? When I worked on Chromium, they were indefinitely in the "maybe in 5-10 years the tooling will be ready" camp.

C++20 is pretty common and gives you already a pretty nice engineering experience.

Re: C++: The Documentary

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Usually poorly. On the contrary. You can focus exactly on the features the higher level game code needs. The C++ stdlib is (for the most part) poorly designed, usually poorly implemented, the main reason for slow build times, and its complexity explodes because it needs to consider all edge cases that most code bases don't ever trigger. A specialized dynamic array class in a few hundred lines (at most!) and with ju…

Saying it doesn't even do bounds checking (in release builds) is to miss one of the major points of C++ - not paying for what you don't need. It's not a mistake, it's a feature. You complain about it not being suitable for game development in one comment but then expect bounds checking in release builds? You're sitting in multiple lanes at the same time. NIH implementations are usually grossly inferior because as it…

The point is that STL does make you pay for stuff you don't need. In complexity and compile times. There's reasons Jai is being developed, and they're not all that Jonathon Blow is weird. As much as C++ owns the game industry right now, it has observable deficits as a great game programming language.

Re: C++: The Documentary

#170
post #142
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, despite all its warts, it is exactly because of them that many reach out to C++. Many of us don't like C, it was already too little and too unsafe, when the first C++ compilers started to hit the market in early 1990's, hence why all desktop OSes moved into C++ for their frameworks. The return to C has caused by the rise of FOSS, UNIX winning the server room, and early GNU coding standards to use only C a…

I work maintaining the toolchain and language runtimes for a commercial safety-certified embedded operating system. I am deeply familiar with C and C++ because I live it and breathe it every day and have done so for over 40 years. Most of our customers use C, probably for historic reasons but also because it is much much easier to reason about and that becomes very important when auditing for functional safety certif…

If only C actually had fat pointers as Dennis Ritchie, one of the authors, proposed to WG14.

It is quite relevant to note that the C authors, were keen to explore Alef as alternative on Plan 9, and based on the learnings reduced C's role on Inferno, and eventually took part in Go's design.

Even though they were not keen into using C++ (Plan 9 doesn't even support it), they were also aware C wasn't to be used for everything.

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