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C++ in Coders at Work

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Re: C++ in Coders at Work

#71

Post by rpledge »

jacquesm wrote: post #36
rpledge wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. While C++ certainly isn't perfect, those of us that write real code that is used and maintained day to day can be very productive. While I know who most of the people in the article are and respect their contributions to the world of software engineering, day to day real world pressures of delivery aren't the same as an example in a book. A hammer isn't an elegant tool, but it gets the nail into t…

If you code in a 'safe' way and you stay away from nifty tricks then you are in good shape. I'm sure you have a little list of stuff that you should stay away from or that you would at least discourage. The problems usually come when people start to use all those nifty features in combinations, especially 'newbie' programmers going wild on all that high level sugar. C/C++ is performance wise also as good as unbeatabl…

I have a list of things to stay away from indeed, but it's due to my own sanity of being. For example, without GC exceptions are almost always going to cause leaks without the team being all C++ experts. If I was designing in Java exceptions are wonderful, in C++, asking for issues

Re: C++ in Coders at Work

#72

Post by jacquesm »

cturner wrote: post #2

Have there been experiments with creating a pre-compiler that checked that you were using a subset of C++? What downsides would this have (other than longer compile time)?

The google style guide posted elsewhere in this thread links to this:

http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cpplint/cp...

Re: C++ in Coders at Work

#73

Post by coliveira »

jacquesm wrote: post #70
coliveira wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The area of a bank that generate money employs the smartest people, usually coming from academia. So, it doesn't surprise me.

Good point. Yours and gcheong's comment just above makes me wonder if someone missed the boat in getting an enterprise level scripting language out the door. It looks like there never was a 'natural' successor to stuff like JCL.

Sun and MS are trying to bring scripting languages to their managed environments. .NET already supports Python reasonably well (I was surprised to see that SharpDevelop http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/ can easily convert most of my C++ into Python).

Re: C++ in Coders at Work

#74

Post by jacquesm »

rpledge wrote: post #71
jacquesm wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you code in a 'safe' way and you stay away from nifty tricks then you are in good shape. I'm sure you have a little list of stuff that you should stay away from or that you would at least discourage. The problems usually come when people start to use all those nifty features in combinations, especially 'newbie' programmers going wild on all that high level sugar. C/C++ is performance wise also as good as unbeatabl…

I have a list of things to stay away from indeed, but it's due to my own sanity of being. For example, without GC exceptions are almost always going to cause leaks without the team being all C++ experts. If I was designing in Java exceptions are wonderful, in C++, asking for issues

> but it's due to my own sanity of being.

I think that is what such lists have in common :)

> For example, without GC exceptions are almost always going to cause leaks without the team being all C++ experts.

That is something I rarely have had trouble with, but I never worked much in teams. I did notice that the double-free and never-freed pointers are a good portion of the problems you encounter in live code though.

And every time firefox goes EWOL I'm fairly sure that somewhere deep down someones code just tried to reference a stale pointer or something like that.

Even in Java exceptions are not all that wonderful, I think they are just a way to say "I don't feel like coding the stuff required to handle this situation properly, let's thrown an exception".

You end up with more exception handling code sometimes than functional code and that isn't the right balance either.

Re: C++ in Coders at Work

#75

Post by tjr »

nradov wrote: post #67
jobu wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one point that I see throughout the article is that every programming shop uses it's own subset of C++. Based on coding conventions, library usage, and business domain I have seen how the C++ code used in different companies can look like a different programming language altogether. My professional experience outside C++ is limited, but I had always assumed this was the same for other languages as well. Is C++ re…

In my experience with Java, the core language is small enough that every company pretty much uses the whole thing. Almost everyone has finally upgraded to using at least the Java 5.0 syntax by now. Occasionally you'll run across silly rules that prohibit things like the ternary operator or multiple returns, but those are minor differences. The big differences come into play with frameworks. Depending on whether you'r…

Occasionally you'll run across silly rules that prohibit things like the ternary operator or multiple returns

In avionics software, the ternary operator and multiple returns are often avoided to help ensure better code coverage during verification.

Re: C++ in Coders at Work

#76

Post by jimbokun »

Oxryly wrote: post #5

Part of how C++ is successful is that it retains C compatibility, and C accurately models how the computer actually works (at least computers of the 70s and 80s, which is all we know how to program well). Lovely languages like lisp, python, haskell may be nicer to work with, but they do not model the underlying machine properly, and for so many problem domains that is just not acceptable. It's not just a performance…

"Part of how C++ is successful is that it retains C compatibility"

I think Objective C is a better object oriented C than C++. It's simpler, makes a syntactic distinction between message passing and "traditional" C, and has a more dynamic run time. I'm surprised no one else has brought up Objective C as a better solution to the "make C object oriented" problem.

Re: C++ in Coders at Work

#77

Post by Periodic »

raganwald wrote: post #14
Oxryly wrote: post #5

Part of how C++ is successful is that it retains C compatibility, and C accurately models how the computer actually works (at least computers of the 70s and 80s, which is all we know how to program well). Lovely languages like lisp, python, haskell may be nicer to work with, but they do not model the underlying machine properly, and for so many problem domains that is just not acceptable. It's not just a performance…

Bjarne was truly correct when he said: "there are languages people complain about, and there are languages nobody uses." I think this is very true, what it says literally is that popularity and attracting ire are correlated. However, my interpretation is that the reason why this is true is that (1) all languages involve design trade-offs, (2) every trade-off pisses someone off for at least a moment, and (3) popularit…

My first impression of the quote is that any language that gains enough users will find people who complain about it.

However, I agree that his main point is more that you will never be able to design a language that is useful to a large number of people without making compromises, and with any compromise there will be at least one person for which it is not the optimal solution.

I don't want to say the relationship between elegance and popularity is strict though. There is simply a good correlation.

Re: C++ in Coders at Work

#78

Post by ilyak »

jimbokun wrote: post #76
Oxryly wrote: post #5

Part of how C++ is successful is that it retains C compatibility, and C accurately models how the computer actually works (at least computers of the 70s and 80s, which is all we know how to program well). Lovely languages like lisp, python, haskell may be nicer to work with, but they do not model the underlying machine properly, and for so many problem domains that is just not acceptable. It's not just a performance…

"Part of how C++ is successful is that it retains C compatibility" I think Objective C is a better object oriented C than C++. It's simpler, makes a syntactic distinction between message passing and "traditional" C, and has a more dynamic run time. I'm surprised no one else has brought up Objective C as a better solution to the "make C object oriented" problem.

It looks like the only platform that had production-level ObjC library was NeXT/OS X.

Re: C++ in Coders at Work

#79

Post by cbeust »

jacquesm wrote: post #7

> Stroustrup campaigned for years and years and years, way beyond any sort of technical contributions he made to the language, to get it adopted and used. And he sort of ran all the standards committees with a whip and a chair. > And he said “no” to no one. And that is the core of the problem.

Actually, the book "Design and Evolution of C++" shows Stroustrup saying "no" to quite a few features (e.g. named parameters). It would probably be more proper to say that Stroustrup didn't say "no" to enough people.

Re: C++ in Coders at Work

#80

Post by Periodic »

jacquesm wrote: post #62
jimbokun wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The biggest problem I have with the language is that the code tends to obscure what is going on at the machine level." Which totally defeats the purpose of being backward compatible with C.

I think that basing it off C was a quick way to get widespread acceptance though. It succeeded in that respect.

Yep. If you had a C program you were automatically already using C++. You could just suddenly start to use the extra features where you wanted them. For that it was great.

If it had been D instead, an actual new version of C designed to incorporate new features, instead of C++, additional features on top of C, it probably would be less reviled but there would have been a lot more resistance to adoption.

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