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C++ and the Culture of Complexity (2013)

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

#51

Post by WillReplyfFood »

WalterBright wrote: post #36
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++.

Java just pushes the complexity into the user's code. For example, a friend of mine once gushed to me about Java IDEs - with one click of a button, a hundred lines of boilerplate are automatically added! I replied a good language shouldn't need boilerplate code automatically inserted.

Boilerplate bureacracy usually happens, when Configurations are not itteratable and/or a language does not enforce the providing of meaningfull defaults. I find both sides guilt and charged here...

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

#52

Post by bayindirh »

pedasmith wrote: post #27
bayindirh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not same for all cases. For example scientific and high performance computing, image processing, or other tasks which need short run times or applications where a single digit optimization results in hours of run time difference is always worth it. Also, since C++ is native, very memory efficient data structures can be written. This property can be leveraged to write very small, very efficient and very resili…

Well, you can spend 5 months writing your software in C++, and a month fixing your bugs and doing a bit of optimization. Or you can spend 3 months writing C# or other modern language and have another 3 months to optimize, all the while enjoying substantially faster compile times and super easy refactoring.

This is not an apples to apples comparison. I've given examples from runtime, not from development time.

OTOH, refactoring in C++ is not hard, at least from my experience. With some knowledge of the language, everyone can write reasonably bug-free C++ (or any other language) application in one go.

Compilation in C++ is a different story. C# is not native. It's converted to CLI (was that the name, I don't use Win32 for ~15 years), then JIT compiles it to machine code, and optimizes over and over in every execution.

Yes, C# is reasonably fast, but it's not native, cross platform (mono doesn't count), and designed to be a systems programming language.

People tend to think C++ is overly verbose, no. Win32 programming model forces simple operations to be long and time consuming for a programmer to implement. Opening a file, serial port, or anything is a single line, because of the (while not everyone likes it) "everything is a file" philosophy, which makes UNIX and C++ much easier, verbose, and accessible.

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

#53

Post by WalterBright »

slavik81 wrote: post #47
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…

What support does C++ have for EBCDIC?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC#Compatibility_with_ASCI...

Most programmers manipulate characters as if they were ASCII, and that code will break if presented with EBCDIC. The C++ Standard is carefully worded to not assume ASCII encoding.

C++ presumably supports other encodings, but I've never heard of another one that will work. There's RADIX50, but that will never work with C++, for the simple reason that there aren't enough characters in it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Radix-50

You can also see the EBCDIC support in oddities like the digraph support.

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

#54

Post by WalterBright »

WillReplyfFood wrote: post #51
WalterBright wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java just pushes the complexity into the user's code. For example, a friend of mine once gushed to me about Java IDEs - with one click of a button, a hundred lines of boilerplate are automatically added! I replied a good language shouldn't need boilerplate code automatically inserted.

Boilerplate bureacracy usually happens, when Configurations are not itteratable and/or a language does not enforce the providing of meaningfull defaults. I find both sides guilt and charged here...

Metaprogramming enables insertion of custom boilerplate without need of an IDE.

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

#56

Post by dingo_bat »

WalterBright wrote: post #35
convolvatron wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just a contrary opinion. I read the c++ book in the very early 90s. someone told me it was the future of programming. every single c++ shop I've worked at since has said, 'well, yes the language is a mess, but if you stick to a well controlled subset, its really pretty good' and all of those shops, without exception, have dragged in every last weird and contradictory feature of what is a really enormous language. so…

> and all of those shops, without exception, have dragged in every last weird and contradictory feature of what is a really enormous language. so I guess the 'sane subset' argument is ok in theory, but really not in practice. To be fair, this happens with every language I've been associated with, even C. Just look at those people who do metaprogramming with the C preprocessor. It's madness! I used to do that too, as…

> To be fair, this happens with every language I've been associated with, even C. Just look at those people who do metaprogramming with the C preprocessor. It's madness!

To be fair, C++ metaprogramming with templates makes C preprocessor look like an insignificant ant in front of a truck.

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

#57

Post by banachtarski »

repsilat wrote: post #28
clishem wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it's a large and complex language that takes time to master. But I'm interested to hear examples of what you call 'profusion of edge cases'. > The ratio between what a C++ compiler will accept and what it will produce sane code for is huge. As is the case for any programming language. > C++, on the other hand, seems to have been designed by compiler writers for their own enjoyment and/or job security. C++ is de…

Disclaimer: I don't program in C++ day to day, so maybe my experience is atypical. Moves and rvalue references (and whatever a PR-value is) and even RVO scare me. They make me want to pass pointers around, because at least I know for sure what'll happen then. (And, funnily enough, C++ seems worse than dynamic languages for this -- more magic around function calls and returns than C or Python or JavaScript.)

They really aren't that bad... in fact, they're pretty useful. Source: your everyday C++ programmer

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

#58

Post by isido »

mikevm wrote: post #48
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.

A good, but difficult question - it's difficult to quantize complexity. Both languages have aim that their users can have much as much control as possible, even if it entails complexity in the language desing.

Perhaps one answer could be, that much of Rust's complexity arises from the concepts of 'borrowing' and 'lifetimes' and how they are encoded in the language.

In C++, complexity much of the complexity arises from the copy/reference semantics, and the possibility of overriding standard behaviour. You need to have wider context to understand local code. So you need to understand how the C++ works on quite a low level and you might need to know more specifics on your C++ codebase than might be the case in Rust.

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

#59

Post by yason »

While my pet peeves might be different than the author's I agree that C++ makes you work very hard to keep things simple and produce something that is beautiful. Just "avoid the complexity you don't absolutely need" doesn't really work: some basic things are so fundamentally convoluted that I rather just write idiomatic C because it's simple and doesn't get in my way. I want the language to originate from simple axioms so that I can concentrate on the complexity of the problem I'm solving instead of wasting brain cycles on battling the complexity of the language. I would like to like C++ but its benefits barely zero out the extra hoops.

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

#60

Post by stinos »

repsilat wrote: post #28
clishem wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it's a large and complex language that takes time to master. But I'm interested to hear examples of what you call 'profusion of edge cases'. > The ratio between what a C++ compiler will accept and what it will produce sane code for is huge. As is the case for any programming language. > C++, on the other hand, seems to have been designed by compiler writers for their own enjoyment and/or job security. C++ is de…

Disclaimer: I don't program in C++ day to day, so maybe my experience is atypical. Moves and rvalue references (and whatever a PR-value is) and even RVO scare me. They make me want to pass pointers around, because at least I know for sure what'll happen then. (And, funnily enough, C++ seems worse than dynamic languages for this -- more magic around function calls and returns than C or Python or JavaScript.)

scare me ... because at least I know for sure what'll happen then.

Which is just because once you learned how pointers behave. Similarly, if you'd just take the time to learn the basics of rvalues, moving, RVO, ..., you won't be scared by them anymore. Might thake longer than pointers, sure, but it's worth it.

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