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Why C++ is not my favourite language

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Re: Why C++ is not my favourite language

#21

Post by jcl »

eru wrote: post #3
eplawless wrote: post #2

That's really cool that this guy thinks dynamic languages have the potential to be faster than C++. Maybe he can write a second article when they are actually faster, with some properly done benchmarks or some valid technical examples.

Common Lisp is already quite fast and dynamic. And for the same number of hacker-hours spend in optimizing, you probably get a larger speedup. Also Python+C can be quite a fast combo. Fast to develop and fast to execute. Forth is also quite fast and dynamic, if you grok it. A lot of functional programming languages have also become quite fast in the last decade. While there are in a sense more fluid than C++, they ar…

I can't help feeling that Common Lisp should be doing better, considering that it's a language where you can effectively tell the compiler "It's OK to store this variable in a register". It's currently doing about the same as Mono, which IIRC doesn't JIT, and worse than Java.

The king of dynamic language performance right now is LuaJIT, which crushes Perl, Python, and Ruby and performs admirably relative to Smalltalk and Scheme.

Re: Why C++ is not my favourite language

#22

Post by acg »

acg wrote: post #12
Legion wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. So many of these articles can be boiled down to: "As long as we limit the comparison to things (our language) does well, and exclude things C/C++ do that (our language) can't do at all, (our language) totally 0wnz C/C++".

Hardly, I know many people who spent years learning C++ in the 90's only to avoid it now. The reason is they had no love for the language. The C++ language design has serious flaws that whenever someone brings them up there's the usual, rolling of the eyes and the "yeah we know" sort of look. The if you criticise you must be a dumb attitude is encouraged by the C++ community too, and that was not borrowed from the C…

Two things:

- Of course there are lots of good things written in C++, there are also lots of dreadful things. This is not a reflection on the language so much but the talent of the developers involved. If nothing good had been written in the language in the last 30 years then it would be a real disaster.

- C continues to be used for very large projects, you only have to look at linux. One of the problems with C++ is the amount of bad programming there is. Perhaps this is because such poor examples are given by the in the Standard C++ Programming book.

There is of course objective-C, I wonder whether the first version of Doom was objective-C: there is a high possibility given it's NextStep lineage.

I'm not sure if I'd go this far but have your read: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/57643...

Re: Why C++ is not my favourite language

#23

Post by gchpaco »

psranga wrote: post #14
magv wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than 10 years ago Jeffrey Mark Siskind posted micro benchmark [1] of his aggressively optimizing Stalin Scheme compiler versus then-current GCC. Stalin produced code 21 time faster than GCC. I do not know why this fact remains so little-known. [1] http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/9801ba2edd...

Note the comparison is to C, not C++. The runtime improvement came from aggressive inlining. I'm pretty sure that C++ code (which allows templates, function objects etc) can be written to do the same. Of course, then we'll get into discussions about whether the C++ code is "idiomatic", requires "wizardry" etc. The biggest win I see for JIT'd dynamic languages is their ability to optimize across source files . I wish…

In fact C++ is usually slower than C because parsing and comprehending it is so damned hard that compiler writers are satisfied when they can get that far.

Re: Why C++ is not my favourite language

#24

Post by dtf »

acg wrote: post #22
acg wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardly, I know many people who spent years learning C++ in the 90's only to avoid it now. The reason is they had no love for the language. The C++ language design has serious flaws that whenever someone brings them up there's the usual, rolling of the eyes and the "yeah we know" sort of look. The if you criticise you must be a dumb attitude is encouraged by the C++ community too, and that was not borrowed from the C…

Two things: - Of course there are lots of good things written in C++, there are also lots of dreadful things. This is not a reflection on the language so much but the talent of the developers involved. If nothing good had been written in the language in the last 30 years then it would be a real disaster. - C continues to be used for very large projects, you only have to look at linux. One of the problems with C++ is…

I think the Doom engine was written in C (and assembler), but the level-editing tools were in Objective-C. Again, the right tool for the right job - Objective-C's dynamic dispatch greatly helps user interface programming compared to bare C, whereas the Doom engine probably had no need for it.

Re: Why C++ is not my favourite language

#25

Post by ajross »

psranga wrote: post #11

From my perspective, most of the stuff about C++ complexity rings untrue. Most people I know seem to know enough about C++ that they can produce pretty good code. Yes, there's a lot of depth to C++ but you derive a lot of benefit from other's wizardry even if you're not a magician yourself. Maybe this guy didn't invest as much time on C++ as he did on his other languages.

I think that's not the right criteria though. Are most of the people you know capable maintaining other people's C++ code?

The idea that you can write (!) sane code in C++ by using a simple/sane subset is of course true. But the problem is that in a language of this complexity no two people are going to be able to agree on what that sane subset is. One person may love auto_ptr and use it everywhere, confusing her coworkers who don't get reference counting idioms, but love the STL...

By the time you manage to get your project's coding standards hammered out and enforced, and get it rigged up so it can talk to your external libraries that don't adhere to those standards, you might as well have given up and used C to begin with.

Re: Why C++ is not my favourite language

#26

Post by UncleOxidant »

eru wrote: post #3
eplawless wrote: post #2

That's really cool that this guy thinks dynamic languages have the potential to be faster than C++. Maybe he can write a second article when they are actually faster, with some properly done benchmarks or some valid technical examples.

Common Lisp is already quite fast and dynamic. And for the same number of hacker-hours spend in optimizing, you probably get a larger speedup. Also Python+C can be quite a fast combo. Fast to develop and fast to execute. Forth is also quite fast and dynamic, if you grok it. A lot of functional programming languages have also become quite fast in the last decade. While there are in a sense more fluid than C++, they ar…

OCaml does quite well against C++ in the shootout. OCaml's Functors and type inferrence are a big win over C++ templates. Yeah, the syntax takes some getting-used-to, but all in all the language seems to hang together much better than C++ (perhaps not saying much)

Re: Why C++ is not my favourite language

#27

Post by UncleOxidant »

dtf wrote: post #5

I guess he's not a systems programmer. What language did Slava Pestov turn to when he recently re-wrote Factor's VM? C++ programmers: we do the dirty work so you don't have to.

It seems like a language like OCaml could do quite well in the VM implementation space: it has very low-level imperative constructs that can be used to optimize, yet also has very good features that allow for generic programming (modules, functors, type inferrance).

Re: Why C++ is not my favourite language

#28

Post by alaricsp »

eplawless wrote: post #2

That's really cool that this guy thinks dynamic languages have the potential to be faster than C++. Maybe he can write a second article when they are actually faster, with some properly done benchmarks or some valid technical examples.

That day may not be too far off... I hope ;-)

Re: Why C++ is not my favourite language

#29

Post by alaricsp »

psranga wrote: post #11

From my perspective, most of the stuff about C++ complexity rings untrue. Most people I know seem to know enough about C++ that they can produce pretty good code. Yes, there's a lot of depth to C++ but you derive a lot of benefit from other's wizardry even if you're not a magician yourself. Maybe this guy didn't invest as much time on C++ as he did on his other languages.

FWIW, I'm working in C for my day job (and resisting calls to move up to C++), as my day job involves shuffling bytes around rather than particularly complex code; it's ~20KLOC. Then we build the tools to manage it in Python with a bit of shell scripting here and there. However, I code Scheme in my spare time, and would do the lot in that if I didn't then have to justify training new developers in Scheme! C's the right tradeoff for commercially developing a high-performance database kernel, IMHO.

I've done plenty of C++ in past jobs... which is why my day job is in C :-)

Re: Why C++ is not my favourite language

#30

Post by dtf »

acg wrote: post #18
ilyak wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please never, never, never ever write C/C++. С - simple and stable, C++ - huge and changing. C - portable and easily parseable, C++ - unpredictable and unparseable. C - good, C++ - bad.

I hear good stories about D from colleagues: http://digitalmars.com/d/2.0/overview.html

D's great for at least two reasons:

1) it set out to be a no-compromise systems programming language

2) it's being designed by people with an deep and intimate knowledge of C++ (Walter Bright wrote a C++ compiler - no mean feat, and Alexander Stepanov was Mr STL)

These guys know the good, the bad and the ugly of C++ much better than most. From the stuff I've seen so far (check out Stepanov's presentations on an iterator-free STL, or adding functional purity, and also look at the work on making floating point more rigorous) this could finally be a worthy successor.

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