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Disclaimer : I'm working on a C++ project and as you will understand I do NOT enjoy it. Every new C++ article about the latest "improvements" to the language t

by Toine 8y ago

Disclaimer : I'm working on a C++ project and as you will understand I do NOT enjoy it. Every new C++ article about the latest "improvements" to the language tends to confirm my belief that C++ developers are masochists. They don't seem to be interested in actually improving the language and making in better and easier at creating useful software. They even seem to laugh at the word "easy". The entire ecosystem feels like a infinite pile of new features fixing old ones, bringing new flaws in the process. Sometimes I feel like this is the case for every language, but C++ is the worst. template <class T> std::string serialize(const T& obj) if constexpr (has_serialize(obj)) { // Now we can place constexpr on the 'if' directly. return obj.serialize(); // This branch will be discarded and therefore not compiled if obj is an int. } else { return std::to_string(obj);branch } } I don't want a language with magic. Magic is hell for software. Show me simplicity and elegance. Show me boring but powerful. Show me how I don't have to choose between value, reference, raw pointer, unique_ptr, shared_ptr, etc, to pass a damn parameter to your function. Show me boring but powerful stuff.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
con22 8y ago
It's always easy to complain
- coldtea 8y ago
  Which is a platitude that doesn't mean anything
- tom_ 8y ago
  Stuff will never get fixed if you don't.
ryanianian 8y ago
C++ has very little "magic" once you get an okay mental-model for how the compiler looks at things. And in fact you can write okay but sub-optimal/"unsafe" C++ that looks kinda like C without that much headache and without using things like unique_ptr (or even really refs to a certain extent). However C++ does let you get as low-level as you want and micro-optimize things and write extremely precise types that other languages can really only dream about. This said: the language is quite complicated which leads to it being "hard" to compile (and hard to learn if you care about some of the more interesting aspects). > C++ developers are masochists In my experience you have to have a very different mindset when writing production-quality C++. It's a lot "slower" to write (at least for me), but in the end you can end up writing some extremely expressive and efficient code that scripting languages can't even express very well (let alone run quickly). (The C++ tooling around build systems and compilers and linkers / arcane black-magic is a real tragedy. I'm holding out for a sane C++ build-and-module system but the language-designers don't seem interested in standardizing these things.) > Show me simplicity and elegance. Show me boring but powerful. Many languages value these as design-goals and you may want to use those languages instead. C++ makes a different set of tradeoffs. It has its own sense of elegance.
- fhood 8y ago
  This is a very romantic view of C++, but not (in my opinion) an accurate one. C++ feels like a language developed without a road map. I agree with the original comment. Many C++ updates are full of band aids to address issues so blatant that they had to fixed by others a long time ago (see boost). > C++ has very little "magic" once you get an okay mental-model for how the compiler looks at things. This is a meaningless statement. I could make the worlds most obtuse and complicated language and you could still say this. Just because after years, and I do mean years, of experience C++ stops regularly blindsiding you does not mean it is a well designed language. There are parts of C++ that are good, beautiful even, but that does not give it a free pass from being among the messiest languages in widespread use.
  - ryanianian 8y ago
    I don't give C++ a free-pass for its warts, I just think it's important to realize where those warts actually live so that I can direct frustration appropriately :) > C++ feels like a language developed without a road map. Many of the warts are there due to the committee's very strong stance on requiring backward-compatibility. This does detract from the language sure, but the tradeoff is code that will continue to compile for many years which is important for huge codebases that want to continue to adopt the latest features. Other languages tend to solve this with breaking-changes (python3, perl6, even java8 or ES* to some extent which arguably changed the whole paradigms of their languages). Ultimately the roadmap is dictated by time-tested experience with existing features and what the community deems the most necessary and practical (see boost which is in many ways an incubator for language ideas). Recent releases are explicitly around new roadmap items like better RAII-pointers and (finally) a standard threading API. There are also new language-features that make the language easier (lambdas, more auto, etc) and faster (rvals/move operations). These are "optional" and can be ignored if you prefer. > Just because ... C++ stops regularly blindsiding you does not mean it is a well designed language. I'm still blind-sided when the compiler does crazy things I hadn't expected, but almost always I end up cursing the tooling not the language. IMHO this is the fault of (1) the documentation being terse and separated from stdlib headers etc, (2) compilers/linkers being rather nasty and slow to work with, and (3) terrible error messages in general. These are problems with the ecosystem and not so much with the language-proper. It's fair to say they sour the whole experience (and they really really do sour it), but the language itself is actually not that surprising once you get past the tooling.
cjhanks 8y ago
I am working on a C++ project and I enjoy it. The bread and butter of C++ is balancing relatively good performance with reasonably acceptable overhead and developer time. I was personally tired of re-writing over and over. template <typename Type> struct PerformOperation { static void Op(int&) {} // noop }; template <> struct PerformOperation<float> { static void Op(int& k) { // do something } }; And all of the specific things you're complaining about... well they're in your control. Do you or your company hold a standard for interfaces or memory tenancy? If not, maybe you need one.
SloopJon 8y ago
> C++ developers .. don't seem to be interested in actually improving the language In his talks at the 2014 and 2017 conferences for the D programming langue, Scott Meyers noted the difference between what individual C++ committee members say they value, and what the process actually produces. Will a new standard every three years make this better or worse? They do seem open to deprecating things that don't work. You might enjoy the 2014 talk, called "The Last Thing D Needs." I don't want to spoil the punchline, which actually struck me as kind of bittersweet, but Scott talked about the distinction that Fred Brooks made in "No Silver Bullet" between essential and accidental complexity. C++ does have a lot of the latter. Edit: link for the 2014 talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAWA1DuvCnQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAWA1DuvCnQ and for the 2017 talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT46MpK39rQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT46MpK39rQ
userbinator 8y ago
Agreed completely, speaking as another one whose worked on C++ projects and tried very hard to stop others on the team from cramming as many new features as they could into code they wrote just for the sake of using them. It's a similar attitude to "architecture astronautism", some people just seem to love creating complexity while others (like me) enjoy the complete opposite. IMHO C++ is good when used as a thin layer of syntactic sugar over C, the "C with classes" that so many C++ fans speak derogatorily of. Then again, my language of choice for general use is C89.
- CobrastanJorji 8y ago
  C89 with -pedantic ,-Wall, and -O2 flags, I hope! O2, of course, not for the speed but or the small number of additional warnings it might generate.
  - platinumrad 8y ago
    There is no real reason not to be using C99 (or C11) unless you work with targets that only have an "ANSI" compiler. The additions that come with each new standard are either sorely needed (stdint.h, stdatomic.h, etc.) or conservative to a fault (_Generic) so you can't even complain about bloat. Down with "ANSI" C fetishism.
roywiggins 8y ago
constexpr in this case seems like a nice and less magic replacement for SFINAE, which always seemed like a bit of a hack
pjmlp 8y ago
I usually work in Java and .NET. Occasionally I drop down to C++, either on private projects, or because I need to integrate some library on the former eco-systems. The only thing I don't enjoy in C++ is the copy-paste compatibility that makes some devs use it as "C with C++" compiler, not even "C with Classes". For devs that dislike magic there is always Go.
dunkelheit 8y ago
I am a C++ dev and I kind of enjoy it. There is a lot of hate towards C++ and a good part of it is justified. Yet what vindicates the language in my opinion is that some of the most complex and interesting software in the world is written in C++ (browsers, search engines, machine learning engines, database management systems, game engines, you name it). So if you want to work on those you'd better know the difference between a reference and a shared_ptr. As for the masochism... Well, after some time you stop noticing the warts and just work around them without expending much mental energy. Not a big deal.
TillE 8y ago
> Show me how I don't have to choose between value, reference, raw pointer, unique_ptr, shared_ptr, etc, to pass a damn parameter to your function. This really sounds like your problem isn't with C++, it's with, well, any language that's "low-level" enough to distinguish between values and references. I grudgingly used C++ for years because at least it was better than C, but since C++11 it's actually been a great experience. Honestly my only complaint about modern C++ development is that the compile times are painfully slow. There are quirks, but overall it's now a wonderfully usable language. Though obviously you shouldn't bother with C++ if you're working on stuff that could just as easily be written in Python or whatever.
mattnewport 8y ago
Bad programmers don't like C++ because it often makes them feel stupid. Good programmers like C++ because it sometimes makes them feel stupid.
andrepd 8y ago
I disagree with almost everything you said in that post; what's more, you're objectively wrong. Let's look at your claims. >Every new C++ article about the latest "improvements" to the language tends to confirm my belief that C++ developers are masochists. They don't seem to be interested in actually improving the language and making in better and easier at creating useful software. [...] The entire ecosystem feels like a infinite pile of new features fixing old ones, bringing new flaws in the process. Can you give a concrete example? C++ evolution can be divided in roughly two eras: C++98, and Modern C++ (C++11 and above). This latter introduces a new philosophy, an expansion of features that make it look like a completely new language indeed. From ubiquitous type deduction, to lambdas, to compile-time computation without TMP, the language has introduced powerful new abstractions, always with the trademark "zero cost" that gives C++ its power. >[Code snippet] >I don't want a language with magic. What about that snippet is magic that leaves you so appalled? You got a great (new) feature: guaranteed compile-time conditionals with the same syntax as regular if statements. Depending on whether the object has serialize or not, the code will instantiate to each of the branches, guaranteeing elision of a potentially expensive runtime check and branch. >Show me simplicity and elegance. [...] Show me how I don't have to choose between value, reference, raw pointer, unique_ptr, shared_ptr, etc, to pass a damn parameter to your function. Show me a language that simpler and more elegant than C++, where you don't have to worry about choosing how to pass parameters, or manage memory, and that still is as fast as C++. You simply can't, because there's no such thing. C++ delivers ZERO-COST ABSTRACTIONS, that's its power, that's its raison d'être. No other language I'm aware of that delivers this, apart from maybe Rust or D. -- I realize it's hip to hate on C++, but please keep it rational.
- vvanders 8y ago
  > Show me a language that simpler and more elegant than C++, where you don't have to worry about choosing how to pass parameters, or manage memory, and that still is as fast as C++. As someone who built their career on memory constrained, fast code in C++ I'm gonna have to say that Rust is simpler and more elegant. You've got your zero cost abstractions, heck I can decided static vs dynamic dispatch at compile time. Lots of things are more explicit leading to less foot-guns that you see with implicit type conversion and the like. Borrow-checker catches all those nasty dataraces and ownership problems up front. I've yet to run across anything I could do in C++ that I can't do in Rust. Listen, I love C++ but I think you may want to expand your horizons a bit before declaring it the best language ever in this space.

by Toine 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

con22 8y ago

It's always easy to complain

coldtea 8y ago
Which is a platitude that doesn't mean anything
tom_ 8y ago
Stuff will never get fixed if you don't.

ryanianian 8y ago

C++ has very little "magic" once you get an okay mental-model for how the compiler looks at things. And in fact you can write okay but sub-optimal/"unsafe" C++ that looks kinda like C without that much headache and without using things like unique_ptr (or even really refs to a certain extent). However C++ does let you get as low-level as you want and micro-optimize things and write extremely precise types that other languages can really only dream about. This said: the language is quite complicated which leads to it being "hard" to compile (and hard to learn if you care about some of the more interesting aspects). > C++ developers are masochists In my experience you have to have a very different mindset when writing production-quality C++. It's a lot "slower" to write (at least for me), but in the end you can end up writing some extremely expressive and efficient code that scripting languages can't even express very well (let alone run quickly). (The C++ tooling around build systems and compilers and linkers / arcane black-magic is a real tragedy. I'm holding out for a sane C++ build-and-module system but the language-designers don't seem interested in standardizing these things.) > Show me simplicity and elegance. Show me boring but powerful. Many languages value these as design-goals and you may want to use those languages instead. C++ makes a different set of tradeoffs. It has its own sense of elegance.

fhood 8y ago
This is a very romantic view of C++, but not (in my opinion) an accurate one. C++ feels like a language developed without a road map. I agree with the original comment. Many C++ updates are full of band aids to address issues so blatant that they had to fixed by others a long time ago (see boost). > C++ has very little "magic" once you get an okay mental-model for how the compiler looks at things. This is a meaningless statement. I could make the worlds most obtuse and complicated language and you could still say this. Just because after years, and I do mean years, of experience C++ stops regularly blindsiding you does not mean it is a well designed language. There are parts of C++ that are good, beautiful even, but that does not give it a free pass from being among the messiest languages in widespread use.
- ryanianian 8y ago
  I don't give C++ a free-pass for its warts, I just think it's important to realize where those warts actually live so that I can direct frustration appropriately :) > C++ feels like a language developed without a road map. Many of the warts are there due to the committee's very strong stance on requiring backward-compatibility. This does detract from the language sure, but the tradeoff is code that will continue to compile for many years which is important for huge codebases that want to continue to adopt the latest features. Other languages tend to solve this with breaking-changes (python3, perl6, even java8 or ES* to some extent which arguably changed the whole paradigms of their languages). Ultimately the roadmap is dictated by time-tested experience with existing features and what the community deems the most necessary and practical (see boost which is in many ways an incubator for language ideas). Recent releases are explicitly around new roadmap items like better RAII-pointers and (finally) a standard threading API. There are also new language-features that make the language easier (lambdas, more auto, etc) and faster (rvals/move operations). These are "optional" and can be ignored if you prefer. > Just because ... C++ stops regularly blindsiding you does not mean it is a well designed language. I'm still blind-sided when the compiler does crazy things I hadn't expected, but almost always I end up cursing the tooling not the language. IMHO this is the fault of (1) the documentation being terse and separated from stdlib headers etc, (2) compilers/linkers being rather nasty and slow to work with, and (3) terrible error messages in general. These are problems with the ecosystem and not so much with the language-proper. It's fair to say they sour the whole experience (and they really really do sour it), but the language itself is actually not that surprising once you get past the tooling.

cjhanks 8y ago

I am working on a C++ project and I enjoy it. The bread and butter of C++ is balancing relatively good performance with reasonably acceptable overhead and developer time. I was personally tired of re-writing over and over. template <typename Type> struct PerformOperation { static void Op(int&) {} // noop }; template <> struct PerformOperation<float> { static void Op(int& k) { // do something } }; And all of the specific things you're complaining about... well they're in your control. Do you or your company hold a standard for interfaces or memory tenancy? If not, maybe you need one.

SloopJon 8y ago

> C++ developers .. don't seem to be interested in actually improving the language In his talks at the 2014 and 2017 conferences for the D programming langue, Scott Meyers noted the difference between what individual C++ committee members say they value, and what the process actually produces. Will a new standard every three years make this better or worse? They do seem open to deprecating things that don't work. You might enjoy the 2014 talk, called "The Last Thing D Needs." I don't want to spoil the punchline, which actually struck me as kind of bittersweet, but Scott talked about the distinction that Fred Brooks made in "No Silver Bullet" between essential and accidental complexity. C++ does have a lot of the latter. Edit: link for the 2014 talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAWA1DuvCnQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAWA1DuvCnQ and for the 2017 talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT46MpK39rQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT46MpK39rQ

userbinator 8y ago

Agreed completely, speaking as another one whose worked on C++ projects and tried very hard to stop others on the team from cramming as many new features as they could into code they wrote just for the sake of using them. It's a similar attitude to "architecture astronautism", some people just seem to love creating complexity while others (like me) enjoy the complete opposite. IMHO C++ is good when used as a thin layer of syntactic sugar over C, the "C with classes" that so many C++ fans speak derogatorily of. Then again, my language of choice for general use is C89.

CobrastanJorji 8y ago
C89 with -pedantic ,-Wall, and -O2 flags, I hope! O2, of course, not for the speed but or the small number of additional warnings it might generate.
- platinumrad 8y ago
  There is no real reason not to be using C99 (or C11) unless you work with targets that only have an "ANSI" compiler. The additions that come with each new standard are either sorely needed (stdint.h, stdatomic.h, etc.) or conservative to a fault (_Generic) so you can't even complain about bloat. Down with "ANSI" C fetishism.

roywiggins 8y ago

constexpr in this case seems like a nice and less magic replacement for SFINAE, which always seemed like a bit of a hack

pjmlp 8y ago

I usually work in Java and .NET. Occasionally I drop down to C++, either on private projects, or because I need to integrate some library on the former eco-systems. The only thing I don't enjoy in C++ is the copy-paste compatibility that makes some devs use it as "C with C++" compiler, not even "C with Classes". For devs that dislike magic there is always Go.

dunkelheit 8y ago

I am a C++ dev and I kind of enjoy it. There is a lot of hate towards C++ and a good part of it is justified. Yet what vindicates the language in my opinion is that some of the most complex and interesting software in the world is written in C++ (browsers, search engines, machine learning engines, database management systems, game engines, you name it). So if you want to work on those you'd better know the difference between a reference and a shared_ptr. As for the masochism... Well, after some time you stop noticing the warts and just work around them without expending much mental energy. Not a big deal.

TillE 8y ago

> Show me how I don't have to choose between value, reference, raw pointer, unique_ptr, shared_ptr, etc, to pass a damn parameter to your function. This really sounds like your problem isn't with C++, it's with, well, any language that's "low-level" enough to distinguish between values and references. I grudgingly used C++ for years because at least it was better than C, but since C++11 it's actually been a great experience. Honestly my only complaint about modern C++ development is that the compile times are painfully slow. There are quirks, but overall it's now a wonderfully usable language. Though obviously you shouldn't bother with C++ if you're working on stuff that could just as easily be written in Python or whatever.

mattnewport 8y ago

Bad programmers don't like C++ because it often makes them feel stupid. Good programmers like C++ because it sometimes makes them feel stupid.

andrepd 8y ago

I disagree with almost everything you said in that post; what's more, you're objectively wrong. Let's look at your claims. >Every new C++ article about the latest "improvements" to the language tends to confirm my belief that C++ developers are masochists. They don't seem to be interested in actually improving the language and making in better and easier at creating useful software. [...] The entire ecosystem feels like a infinite pile of new features fixing old ones, bringing new flaws in the process. Can you give a concrete example? C++ evolution can be divided in roughly two eras: C++98, and Modern C++ (C++11 and above). This latter introduces a new philosophy, an expansion of features that make it look like a completely new language indeed. From ubiquitous type deduction, to lambdas, to compile-time computation without TMP, the language has introduced powerful new abstractions, always with the trademark "zero cost" that gives C++ its power. >[Code snippet] >I don't want a language with magic. What about that snippet is magic that leaves you so appalled? You got a great (new) feature: guaranteed compile-time conditionals with the same syntax as regular if statements. Depending on whether the object has serialize or not, the code will instantiate to each of the branches, guaranteeing elision of a potentially expensive runtime check and branch. >Show me simplicity and elegance. [...] Show me how I don't have to choose between value, reference, raw pointer, unique_ptr, shared_ptr, etc, to pass a damn parameter to your function. Show me a language that simpler and more elegant than C++, where you don't have to worry about choosing how to pass parameters, or manage memory, and that still is as fast as C++. You simply can't, because there's no such thing. C++ delivers ZERO-COST ABSTRACTIONS, that's its power, that's its raison d'être. No other language I'm aware of that delivers this, apart from maybe Rust or D. -- I realize it's hip to hate on C++, but please keep it rational.

vvanders 8y ago
> Show me a language that simpler and more elegant than C++, where you don't have to worry about choosing how to pass parameters, or manage memory, and that still is as fast as C++. As someone who built their career on memory constrained, fast code in C++ I'm gonna have to say that Rust is simpler and more elegant. You've got your zero cost abstractions, heck I can decided static vs dynamic dispatch at compile time. Lots of things are more explicit leading to less foot-guns that you see with implicit type conversion and the like. Borrow-checker catches all those nasty dataraces and ownership problems up front. I've yet to run across anything I could do in C++ that I can't do in Rust. Listen, I love C++ but I think you may want to expand your horizons a bit before declaring it the best language ever in this space.