181–190 of 334 posts
I obviously don’t know them personally, but what I get from this old school generation that have been a pillar of computer science and, why not, modern human history, is just a tiny little bit more humbleness than “influential” people nowadays.
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The tooling people have - as of about a year ago said they are ready. Now everyone who considers themselves early adopters is using then. Most are waiting for the early adopters to figure out what the best practices are so we don't make a mess
What early adopters are using them? Because my impression is the tooling still isn’t there
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Your citation refers to the register keyword and trigraphs, among other language features -- the author seems to have forgotten his own point, among a number of other inconsistencies and contradictions, and at times seems to go out of his way to come across as a jerk, e.g., "This is what fifteen years of standards work on an eight-letter keyword looks like". People love to rag on the standards committee. I was on X3J…
The C Committee is fine and doing great work! The C++ Committee could actually learn a thing or two from how things are done on the C side.
Or _Keywords with an additional header file?
Maybe something_ names as proper namespaces are too hard?
One could mention better testing before adding features to the standards, but then C99 VLAs happened.
My only problem with C++ is that it’s too verbose. my eyes need to parse huuge chunks of things when I just want some convenient syntax for it. otherwise the idioms are pretty universal for most programming languages nowadays.
On top of that, C++ allows to design very concise APIs. (One of my favorite examples is sol2: https://github.com/ThePhd/sol2).
Library code involving templates, on the other hand, can be pretty complex and hard to read. Concepts and other C++20 features (like [[no_unique_address]]) are certainly an improvement, but only new projects with no backwards compatibility requirements can actually use them (unconditionally).
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What early adopters are using them? Because my impression is the tooling still isn’t there
CMake says they are there. Other tools mostly are not. Nobody has said they are using them in anything important, but hopefully that is coming.
> currently (as of Q3 2025) the fastest-growing of the top four languages in the world… +90% users in the past 3.5 years. Because of AI, right?
C++ is one of the languages less suited to the strengths of coding agents. The language which still supports C-style pointers, arbitrary datatype conversions, and inherits architecture-specific undefined behavior gives you too many ways to fail at solving a problem. As a programmer, I love coding in C++ because I know what I'm doing. I'd hate reviewing C++ code though.
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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…
You're almost certainly better off with Rust at this point or, if you must have C-like development, Zig.
> currently (as of Q3 2025) the fastest-growing of the top four languages in the world… +90% users in the past 3.5 years. Because of AI, right?
If this is a rhetorical question I genuinely don't know what's the implied answer. Why would AI specifically make C++ grow?
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Personally I don't find programming with C++ that hard. The downside is it needs a brain warm-up, and this is per project, but once that flywheel is spinning, I find it almost effortless to write code. I have to go through the same warm-up more or less for any language I work with, so it's not that different than writing Python, Go or Java for me.
I agree. You don't learn or know C++ in the way you learn or know C. You never have the total language spec in mind. Much of it you will never (and for some of it should never) come across. The way I think of it C is an abstraction of the machine, so thin it's nearly transparent. C++ is an abstraction over programming paradigms, letting you pick how you think. Everything else abstracts the machine away, replacing it…
Looks like someone fell for the C abstract machine trap yet again. No, C is isn’t an abstraction of the machine.