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Cello and C++ are have very different design goals. Cello is essentially a dynamic language implementation on top of C, and uses runtime reflection in places where a C++ programmer would probably prefer compile-time template hackery.
Idiomatic C++ is not like Cello at all. But it still allows you to do all things that Cello does - and most of them wouldn't be macros then, but classes and overloaded operators on them.
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Idiomatic C++ is not like Cello at all. But it still allows you to do all things that Cello does - and most of them wouldn't be macros then, but classes and overloaded operators on them.
Somehow I doubt C++'s built-in object system will allow you to create classes (yes, classes, not objects) and/or alter their vtables at runtime. (I know, vtables are an implementation detail. You still get the idea.)
The point is that building blocks that you get from C++ are higher-level even so - classes, operator overloading, template metaprogramming etc - which should make it possible to implement something like Cello with a lot less effort (and hacks).
Why not just use C++?
That's like saying "Why not just use lisp?" to a python programmer. They're entirely separate languages (albeit it they do share some commonalities, but not as many as you might think). C is my main language and I dabble in C++. I really dislike C++. I love C. I welcome any efforts to add a bit of higher level functionality to C. I have no desire (ever) to switch to C++.
That's not really true now is it? Sure, C++ and C are separate languages but they have a common history and everyone knows that. One can write extensive programs that are valid for both C++ and C compilers. C isn't a true subset of C++ but for from many practical perspectives it is. In practice they have a common ancestor language that still can be (more or less) compiled with both compilers.
Lisp and Python however... they have no such common ancestor and the syntax are very different.
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C is close to the hardware, yes. But simplest possible programming language? No way.
"Simple" was a poor choice of words as it doesn't capture what I mean. I meant "fewest possible abstractions over the underlying hardware". BF and Lisp are both much simpler than C, but don't fit what I was trying to get at, as they present a totally different abstraction that is actually quite different from the underlying hardware. (Actually, so is C, since assembly language is itself an abstraction and processors…
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C programmer here. Cello isn't really C. So as long as you're using something that isn't quite C, and you want an object model, I think "why not C++?" is a reasonable question.
Looks like C to be. Just some macros and function calls.
What features make it "higher level"? It looks like syntactic sugar on C code without any real improvements (aside from GC).
You've really gone down the rabbit hole if you think GC is an improvment
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Who's being harmed?
Presumably, people who wanted to talk about Cello in this thread, not Rust, and are having the signal-to-noise ratio reduced by this derailing.