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C++ and the Culture of Complexity (2013)

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Re: C++ and the Culture of Complexity (2013)

#41

Post by pjmlp »

WalterBright wrote: post #30
notacoward wrote: post #16

The bullet list near the end closely matches my own experience with C++. There's an inordinate number of features creating an even worse profusion of edge cases where they interact. Then the "solutions" for those edge cases usually add even more complexity. Worse, they force programmers to coddle their compilers. The ratio between what a C++ compiler will accept and what it will produce sane code for is huge . That's…

> C++, on the other hand, seems to have been designed by compiler writers for their own enjoyment and/or job security. Being a C++ compiler writer (Zortech C++, Symantec C++, Digital Mars C++) I can assure you this is not true at all. As to why C++ is so complex, my opinion is it is because it was designed a long time ago, what is considered better practice in designing languages has moved on, and C++ is unwilling to…

> For example, why does C++ still support EBCDIC?

Because there are companies like Unisys and IBM that want to sell C++ compilers to their mainframe customers.

Re: C++ and the Culture of Complexity (2013)

#42

Post by anfilt »

notacoward wrote: post #16

The bullet list near the end closely matches my own experience with C++. There's an inordinate number of features creating an even worse profusion of edge cases where they interact. Then the "solutions" for those edge cases usually add even more complexity. Worse, they force programmers to coddle their compilers. The ratio between what a C++ compiler will accept and what it will produce sane code for is huge . That's…

>"C++, on the other hand, seems to have been designed by compiler writers for their own enjoyment and/or job security."

It's not what a compiler writer would want by any stretch. Having helped write a C++ compiler I can a test to that. I will agree that C is a nice language. It does exactly as you tell it.

The complexity I would say is what you get when you "design by committee"

Web standards have a similar problem they keep growing and getting more complex. Try to write a browser from the ground up these days.

Re: C++ and the Culture of Complexity (2013)

#43

Post by blub »

pjmlp wrote: post #20
foo101 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C++ is a complex language no doubt. But software written in C++ need not be complex. Java, on the other hand, is a simple language. But the kind of unnecessary complexity I have seen in Java-land (EJBs, Spring, etc.) has no parallel in the C++-land. So going by your argument, I would choose C++ over Java to avoid the complexity jump, then profile the app, and if any part's too slow, improve that again in C++.

Oh boy, you must be really young. No parallel in C++?!!!?? That is where EJBs and Spring come from. The enterprise architects that created those kind of designs, were the same ones that on earlier decade were doing them with C++. Apparently micro-services are now a thing, well on the late 90's we had Sun RPC, CORBA, DCOM. All tied together with a cluster distributed transaction management. Sprinkled with code generat…

We should all be thankful that the Java and C# communities have offered a welcoming home to all the architecture astronauts :)

Re: C++ and the Culture of Complexity (2013)

#44

Post by blub »

lallysingh wrote: post #6
ioquatix wrote: post #4

Yes, C++ is a complex language. Yes, it has a ton of warts if you know where to look. But, you can write beautiful software with it, and it can even look beautiful too. Yes, there are alternatives, but when it comes to performance, expressiveness and actual deployability, C++ is pretty awesome.

Meh. The performance is almost never worth the huge complexity jump. Instead, profile an app in a higher level language and if any part's too slow, implement that in C/C++. That'll quite often be a low, single digit percentage of the app. Get the performance for substantially less engineering/maintenance cost.

Also known as the credo of the software industry: why build something performant, robust, secure and usable when you can ship an Electron app that's barely fast enough and patch the bugs later?

Re: C++ and the Culture of Complexity (2013)

#45

Post by WalterBright »

pjmlp wrote: post #41
WalterBright wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> C++, on the other hand, seems to have been designed by compiler writers for their own enjoyment and/or job security. Being a C++ compiler writer (Zortech C++, Symantec C++, Digital Mars C++) I can assure you this is not true at all. As to why C++ is so complex, my opinion is it is because it was designed a long time ago, what is considered better practice in designing languages has moved on, and C++ is unwilling to…

> For example, why does C++ still support EBCDIC? Because there are companies like Unisys and IBM that want to sell C++ compilers to their mainframe customers.

IBM can support it as an extension in their C++ compiler. No need to burden the rest of the community with it. It's not like C++ compiler vendors are shy about adding extensions :-)

Despite C++ supporting EBCDIC, I seriously doubt the overwhelming majority of string processing C++ code will work with EBCDIC anyway, because the programmers probably never heard of it, let alone tested the software with it.

Re: C++ and the Culture of Complexity (2013)

#46

Post by bjorn2k »

I agree that c++ is complex, but remember that while trying to update the language the standard committee is trying not to do breaking changes. If you can do a greenfield implementation like rust, you don't have the baggage of an installed base, yet. If you compare c++ to a language that is also around for more that 25 years it starts to make more sense why it is complex. Add to that, that it started as an extension to c, which is the reason why it became popular in the beginning. Also, zero-cost run-time abstractions.

It is whatever you give priority design-wise, and if you look at what is important in c++ (zero-cost runtime abstractions, control of the resulting code), then ending up with something as complex as the c++ language is hard to prevent.

Re: C++ and the Culture of Complexity (2013)

#47

Post by slavik81 »

WalterBright wrote: post #30
notacoward wrote: post #16

The bullet list near the end closely matches my own experience with C++. There's an inordinate number of features creating an even worse profusion of edge cases where they interact. Then the "solutions" for those edge cases usually add even more complexity. Worse, they force programmers to coddle their compilers. The ratio between what a C++ compiler will accept and what it will produce sane code for is huge . That's…

> C++, on the other hand, seems to have been designed by compiler writers for their own enjoyment and/or job security. Being a C++ compiler writer (Zortech C++, Symantec C++, Digital Mars C++) I can assure you this is not true at all. As to why C++ is so complex, my opinion is it is because it was designed a long time ago, what is considered better practice in designing languages has moved on, and C++ is unwilling to…

What support does C++ have for EBCDIC?

Re: C++ and the Culture of Complexity (2013)

#48

Post by mikevm »

notacoward wrote: post #16

The bullet list near the end closely matches my own experience with C++. There's an inordinate number of features creating an even worse profusion of edge cases where they interact. Then the "solutions" for those edge cases usually add even more complexity. Worse, they force programmers to coddle their compilers. The ratio between what a C++ compiler will accept and what it will produce sane code for is huge . That's…

How is Rust less complicated than C++? I don't use it, but from what I read it seems to be even more complicated, and getting even more so with the myriad of features they are adding each release.

Re: C++ and the Culture of Complexity (2013)

#49

Post by coldtea »

hux_ wrote: post #39
notacoward wrote: post #16

The bullet list near the end closely matches my own experience with C++. There's an inordinate number of features creating an even worse profusion of edge cases where they interact. Then the "solutions" for those edge cases usually add even more complexity. Worse, they force programmers to coddle their compilers. The ratio between what a C++ compiler will accept and what it will produce sane code for is huge . That's…

Oh give me a break. Following this logic, why aren't you writing your code in English? The real world is complex. Don't confuse hiding complexity with minimizing complexity.

>Following this logic, why aren't you writing your code in English?

Because slippery slope arguments never shone light on any situation.

>The real world is complex.

Which is neither here, nor there. We're talking about programming languages -- where you can be 10x as complex as another, but as long as you're both Turing Complete, you can't really do anything substantially more.

So, this is not about more power to handle "the real world", but about ergonomics. Which nobody ever said were C++ strong point.

>Don't confuse hiding complexity with minimizing complexity.

Well, we should also not confuse adding complexity with adding expressiveness.

Re: C++ and the Culture of Complexity (2013)

#50

Post by coldtea »

api wrote: post #21
notacoward wrote: post #16

The bullet list near the end closely matches my own experience with C++. There's an inordinate number of features creating an even worse profusion of edge cases where they interact. Then the "solutions" for those edge cases usually add even more complexity. Worse, they force programmers to coddle their compilers. The ratio between what a C++ compiler will accept and what it will produce sane code for is huge . That's…

C++ is a language with a lot of features, and not all of them should be used in every code base. It's quite possible to write simple, portable, and relatively clean C++ code if you use only those features you need. It's not the prettiest language by any stretch, but it's quite capable and fast and has excellent support across just about every platform.

>C++ is a language with a lot of features, and not all of them should be used in every code base.

That's not up to the individual coder coming later to a codebase. Or wanting to use a library that enforces those features, etc.

And the design of the features can impact how other features are implemented, even one doesn't use them.

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