5 ms·

I know a lot of companies that immediately adopt the new standards in C++, sometimes as soon as the compiler supports them, even if the standards aren't officia

I know a lot of companies that immediately adopt the new standards in C++, sometimes as soon as the compiler supports them, even if the standards aren't official yet. For example, I was working at a company that was using C++14 features in 2013.

zarkov99 9y ago
Right. We now have two world class compilers, gcc and clang, which both track the standard closely and this has forced Microsoft to improve their compliance as well. It is a golden age for C++ right now.
- harry8 9y ago
  The golden age of C++ is that java, python, ruby, clojure javascript and so on all exist so developers who have a dislike and/or perhaps low aptitude for C++ aren't in your codebase because it really isn't the only game in town. Compiler support, standardisation of things we needed in the late 80s sure. great, yeah, all good and helpful. Not having a constant standing fight to keep the worst nasty rubbish out of your codebase so you can get on with writing code that achieves something useful in a manner that's not hideous. That's a change that didn't come from within C++. C++ culture from Bjarne on down is still hideous. Arrogant, aggressive and generally nasty. Fix that and we'd really get the golden age. I stay as far away from C++ "people", committees, conferences etc. as I can. Yeah "No loss" would be the usual response and I'm sure that's true, I'm not such a genius that the loss of me matters at all. There will be plenty more, some of whom have great contributions they will make elsewhere, to think otherwise is just the usual C++ "smart people" nasty, competitive arrogance.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    C++ is pretty much the only game in town for those having those alternative languages running at all. When LLVM, GCC, JVM and CLR stop being written in C++, then we have sound alternatives. Java Metropolis or .NET Native with Rosyln are not there yet. Rust doesn't seem to be taking over systems development at any major commercial OS for the time being. Hopefully it will, if Fuchsia ever becomes a commercial product. Swift is pretty much an Apple only language and isn't fully stable yet. So until then, I rather take a polyglot approach C++ and Language X, while helping drive away the C style coding that plagues our stacks.
    - UnpossibleJim 9y ago
      This might be a sloght departure, sp forgive me, but what exactly is going on with Rust? Their user base is rabid and loyal as any as I've seen, and their evangelists spout out content at a fair pace, but it doesn't seem to be gaining a huge amount of popularity (I may be wrong, but I've seen very little demand/job postings). Has it just not hit critical mass, is there not enough general utility or is the thought of leaving a language with a C in the name just too frightening?
      - pjmlp 9y ago
        The actual Rust developers are not like that, they are quite friendly and help anyone that wanders into their forums. Google is already using Rust on a few ChromeOS and Fuchsia libraries. Firefox is getting more components ported from C++ into Rust. Microsoft adopted a regexp engine, written in Rust, for Visual Studio Code. So some victories, but the language still needs to mature in a few domains, UI, IDE, DB drivers, graphical debuggers, processors, and these things take time. It took C++ almost 20 years to steal some industries from C, while others still choose C and Assembly as their daily tools. It takes years to replace tooling, and many times the sucesses are not only technical, but are heavy influenced by social and political reasoning.
      - steveklabnik 9y ago
        https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/friends.html https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/friends.html is a non-exhaustive list of companies using Rust in production. Many don't explicitly hire Rust devs, but hire devs in general, as they won't just be working on Rust projects, but also on others. That's not always the case, but it's common. For example, Amazon recently posted a job listing saying that "Rust knowledge is a plus," that's because a small bit of it is in Rust, but you need to be familiar with other tech too.
    - harry8 9y ago
      If you want to /write/ code there are many options. The most significant of the ones I listed is Java. If you don't like C++, pointers and such Java is actually a nice language and people can and do get jobs programming in that language and do good work there. They don't write code in my C++ code base anymore. The overwhelming majority of people writing C++ nowadays actually want to write code in C++ and have alternatives where they can get paid, well, if they didn't. It really wasn't always that way.
  - hellofunk 9y ago
    > C++ culture from Bjarne on down is still hideous. Arrogant, aggressive and generally nasty. This is the complete opposite of my experience. Most are among the most humble people I've met.
    - harry8 9y ago
      "I understand what you are trying to say and I think that you are wrong." --Bjarne Stroustrup, to a chorus of razzes, jeers and laughter at a question in going native a few years back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB-bdWKwXsU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB-bdWKwXsU about 1:09:30 But hey don't take my word for it, my reputation is nothing and I'm as anonymous as a wrong number whether I like it that way or not. How about Ken Thompson? His doesn't seem to be similar, if you like an argument from authority - and I think such argument has a place if not used exclusively. "I would try out the [C++] language [at AT&T] as it was being developed and make comments on it. It was part of the work atmosphere there. And you'd write something and then the next day it wouldn't work because the language changed. It was very unstable for a very long period of time. At some point, I said, no, no more. In an interview I said exactly that, that I didn't use it because it wouldn't stay still for two days in a row. When Stroustrup read the interview he came screaming into my room about how I was undermining him and what I said mattered and I said it was a bad language." Ken Thompson; cited in Seibel, Peter (2009). Coders At Work. p. 475. Alexandrescou openly criticises Alasdair Meredith at cpp con in a way that isn't really friendly or respectful. He also finishes all his talks with "Destroy!" as an open acknowledgement of the defensiveness he feels about the naked hostility that exists in the C++ world. I like his stuff and the bulk of his attitude, I hate the context and that it brings rubbish like this out of him. newsgroups (remember them?), c++faq - in which the most arrogant and hostile entries seem to correlate pretty closely with all the stuff widely acknowledged to be horrible (eg auto pointer, remember that?). Think about it, remember all the c++ places you've been. Which were really, actually, you know, friendly? Compare the general tenor of it all to the Python community, the Perl community, the Ruby. Hell even compare it to the way the python community and the Perl community interact with each other and it's vastly more pleasant. C++ is just straight up nasty, competitive, "No you're wrong because I'm smarter than you" "I've been anointed" garbage and it needs to be called as such. It really holds everything back. If I had to pick a word to describe it that word would be "macho." I think it's reasonable to suggest that if one has a point of view, make the argument, back it with your evidence, acknowledge that those who disagree are neither heretics nor idiots is the right thing on a number of levels.

zarkov99 9y ago

Right. We now have two world class compilers, gcc and clang, which both track the standard closely and this has forced Microsoft to improve their compliance as well. It is a golden age for C++ right now.

harry8 9y ago
The golden age of C++ is that java, python, ruby, clojure javascript and so on all exist so developers who have a dislike and/or perhaps low aptitude for C++ aren't in your codebase because it really isn't the only game in town. Compiler support, standardisation of things we needed in the late 80s sure. great, yeah, all good and helpful. Not having a constant standing fight to keep the worst nasty rubbish out of your codebase so you can get on with writing code that achieves something useful in a manner that's not hideous. That's a change that didn't come from within C++. C++ culture from Bjarne on down is still hideous. Arrogant, aggressive and generally nasty. Fix that and we'd really get the golden age. I stay as far away from C++ "people", committees, conferences etc. as I can. Yeah "No loss" would be the usual response and I'm sure that's true, I'm not such a genius that the loss of me matters at all. There will be plenty more, some of whom have great contributions they will make elsewhere, to think otherwise is just the usual C++ "smart people" nasty, competitive arrogance.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  C++ is pretty much the only game in town for those having those alternative languages running at all. When LLVM, GCC, JVM and CLR stop being written in C++, then we have sound alternatives. Java Metropolis or .NET Native with Rosyln are not there yet. Rust doesn't seem to be taking over systems development at any major commercial OS for the time being. Hopefully it will, if Fuchsia ever becomes a commercial product. Swift is pretty much an Apple only language and isn't fully stable yet. So until then, I rather take a polyglot approach C++ and Language X, while helping drive away the C style coding that plagues our stacks.
  - UnpossibleJim 9y ago
    This might be a sloght departure, sp forgive me, but what exactly is going on with Rust? Their user base is rabid and loyal as any as I've seen, and their evangelists spout out content at a fair pace, but it doesn't seem to be gaining a huge amount of popularity (I may be wrong, but I've seen very little demand/job postings). Has it just not hit critical mass, is there not enough general utility or is the thought of leaving a language with a C in the name just too frightening?
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      The actual Rust developers are not like that, they are quite friendly and help anyone that wanders into their forums. Google is already using Rust on a few ChromeOS and Fuchsia libraries. Firefox is getting more components ported from C++ into Rust. Microsoft adopted a regexp engine, written in Rust, for Visual Studio Code. So some victories, but the language still needs to mature in a few domains, UI, IDE, DB drivers, graphical debuggers, processors, and these things take time. It took C++ almost 20 years to steal some industries from C, while others still choose C and Assembly as their daily tools. It takes years to replace tooling, and many times the sucesses are not only technical, but are heavy influenced by social and political reasoning.
    - steveklabnik 9y ago
      https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/friends.html https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/friends.html is a non-exhaustive list of companies using Rust in production. Many don't explicitly hire Rust devs, but hire devs in general, as they won't just be working on Rust projects, but also on others. That's not always the case, but it's common. For example, Amazon recently posted a job listing saying that "Rust knowledge is a plus," that's because a small bit of it is in Rust, but you need to be familiar with other tech too.
  - harry8 9y ago
    If you want to /write/ code there are many options. The most significant of the ones I listed is Java. If you don't like C++, pointers and such Java is actually a nice language and people can and do get jobs programming in that language and do good work there. They don't write code in my C++ code base anymore. The overwhelming majority of people writing C++ nowadays actually want to write code in C++ and have alternatives where they can get paid, well, if they didn't. It really wasn't always that way.
- hellofunk 9y ago
  > C++ culture from Bjarne on down is still hideous. Arrogant, aggressive and generally nasty. This is the complete opposite of my experience. Most are among the most humble people I've met.
  - harry8 9y ago
    "I understand what you are trying to say and I think that you are wrong." --Bjarne Stroustrup, to a chorus of razzes, jeers and laughter at a question in going native a few years back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB-bdWKwXsU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB-bdWKwXsU about 1:09:30 But hey don't take my word for it, my reputation is nothing and I'm as anonymous as a wrong number whether I like it that way or not. How about Ken Thompson? His doesn't seem to be similar, if you like an argument from authority - and I think such argument has a place if not used exclusively. "I would try out the [C++] language [at AT&T] as it was being developed and make comments on it. It was part of the work atmosphere there. And you'd write something and then the next day it wouldn't work because the language changed. It was very unstable for a very long period of time. At some point, I said, no, no more. In an interview I said exactly that, that I didn't use it because it wouldn't stay still for two days in a row. When Stroustrup read the interview he came screaming into my room about how I was undermining him and what I said mattered and I said it was a bad language." Ken Thompson; cited in Seibel, Peter (2009). Coders At Work. p. 475. Alexandrescou openly criticises Alasdair Meredith at cpp con in a way that isn't really friendly or respectful. He also finishes all his talks with "Destroy!" as an open acknowledgement of the defensiveness he feels about the naked hostility that exists in the C++ world. I like his stuff and the bulk of his attitude, I hate the context and that it brings rubbish like this out of him. newsgroups (remember them?), c++faq - in which the most arrogant and hostile entries seem to correlate pretty closely with all the stuff widely acknowledged to be horrible (eg auto pointer, remember that?). Think about it, remember all the c++ places you've been. Which were really, actually, you know, friendly? Compare the general tenor of it all to the Python community, the Perl community, the Ruby. Hell even compare it to the way the python community and the Perl community interact with each other and it's vastly more pleasant. C++ is just straight up nasty, competitive, "No you're wrong because I'm smarter than you" "I've been anointed" garbage and it needs to be called as such. It really holds everything back. If I had to pick a word to describe it that word would be "macho." I think it's reasonable to suggest that if one has a point of view, make the argument, back it with your evidence, acknowledge that those who disagree are neither heretics nor idiots is the right thing on a number of levels.