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If anything it seems like C++ is the one in decline. C is still the only option for lots of use-cases; C++ is a) succumbing to feature-bloat and b) having diffe

by _bxg1 6y ago

If anything it seems like C++ is the one in decline. C is still the only option for lots of use-cases; C++ is a) succumbing to feature-bloat and b) having different parts of its userbase siphoned off by Go, Rust, Swift, even C# (games; both Unity and Godot).

jonstewart 6y ago
C++ has been greatly reinvigorated this past decade with language and compiler modernization. Few C++ programmers decamped to Go; most of Go’s adoptees came from Python. Go doesn’t have all that much to offer a C++ programmer.
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  > Go doesn’t have all that much to offer a C++ programmer. Concurrency and parallelism without debugging hell is huge.
  - gumby 6y ago
    C++ will be getting a concurrency model, likely in C++23. As with other language features the position papers and implementations refer not only with their authors’ experience with C++ efforts (libuv, asio, pthreads) but other languages as well, such as go.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    C++20 offers both with very nice graphical debuggers, which Delve isn't really a match for.
    - abjKT26nO8 6y ago
      What graphical debuggers for C++ do you recommend?
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        Visual C++ ones.
        abjKT26nO8 6y ago
        That's not really an option for me when I debug C++ that is run on a Linux or Android TV. It also wouldn't be an option when I used to work with C++ that was used on Linux servers. That's a big chunk of C++ use. While I have your attention, I see your comments here in C++ threads quite often. You seem to like the language and at the same time you have some experience with simpler languages like Oberon. My experience with C++ has been that people happily go on to create giant inheritance hierarchies, with no restraint for multiple inheritance to the point that it's so unmanagable that nobody knows where things go and what actually happens. With all that inheritance, they lose track that the same thing has actually been copied tens of times between different classes and now these tens of classes have code that is basically copy-pasted and who knows what benefit anyone has from all this inheritance. Google engineers are one of the offenders when it comes to overuse of inheritance. Then, modern C++ allegedly fixes some warts, but IME it introduces more of them. E.g. the initialization fiasco (I honestly can't say with 100% confidence what braces do when you initialize std::vector). Then there is this thing that when you create a lambda like so: [&] { ... } And then move it to a function which will create lambdas of this form, just with different captures: std::function<void()> create_lambda(args...) { return [&] { ... }; } The second version will crash later when you run the lambda. Because it turns out that "[&]" just copies the stack pointer and isn't syntactic sugar for enumerating all the variables that you capture. This was non-obvious to me and it was really hard to track down the first time I encountered this problem. I think "[&]" is broken. Similarly, std::thread crashing in destructor when the user doesn't call std::thread::join, nor std::thread::detach. The ambiguity of syntax... I just don't buy that "modern C++" makes things particularly better. It sometimes makes them worse. Don't you experience the same fatigue as I do? EDIT: Oh, I just remembered another thing: at a previous job we discovered that MinGW's implementation of std::random_device just returned 0 every time. It is major facepalm for MinGW, but also for the C++ standard for making this behaviour allowed (yes, it's actually compliant with the standard). And even after it was fixed, there are still systematic issues with this whole randomness API. E.g. you can't actually seed it properly[1]. [1]: https://codingnest.com/generating-random-numbers-using-c-standard-library-the-problems/ https://codingnest.com/generating-random-numbers-using-c-sta...
  - adev_ 6y ago
    > Concurrency and parallelism without debugging hell is huge. There is plenty of libraries in C++ that haves you concurrency and parallelism without debugging hell. Hell in concurrent code comes when you have shared state, and that is valid for both Go and C++. Using shared Golang Map in multi-threaded code is a very good example of deathtrap, even if it's in Go.
vips7L 6y ago
Swift? I didn't know it had much use outside of mac/iOS. It seems like a cool language otherwise.
- _bxg1 6y ago
  It just recently got official support for Windows and Linux, and it had low-key Linux support for a while before that. I've heard of people writing web servers in it. Like Go, it compiles directly to native machine code.
  - vips7L 6y ago
    Isn't it still slower than GO because of referencing counting?
    - _bxg1 6y ago
      Depends what you mean by slow. Go is garbage-collected, Swift is reference-counted. Each has advantages and disadvantages. But also, that doesn't apply to stack-allocated values. It's not as simple as one being faster than the other.
pjmlp 6y ago
The only thing keeping C around are FOSS UNIX clones and embedded developers that are religiously stuck with C89 and their PIC compiler extensions. Even Arduino like boards use C++ nowadays. Unity and Godot have their graphics engine written in C++. Rust, Swift are dependent on LLVM, written in C++. Go, it isn't really in the same league of programmer expressiveness.
- worik 6y ago
  I have spend the quarantine hacking in C. On FreeCIV. Still used lots and lots of places
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Same can be said by any programming language, C is the Cobol of systems programming languages, so as long as there UNIX FOSS clones it won't go away.
  - hannofcart 6y ago
    Freeciv fan here. What are you working on in it?
    - worik 6y ago
      Forked Attitude AI and making a rules based AI
- saagarjha 6y ago
  There are lots of performance sensitive tools, language runtimes, and cross-platform libraries written in C.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    And even more written in C++. Should we start counting which ones?
    - 6y ago

by _bxg1 6y ago

jonstewart 6y ago

C++ has been greatly reinvigorated this past decade with language and compiler modernization. Few C++ programmers decamped to Go; most of Go’s adoptees came from Python. Go doesn’t have all that much to offer a C++ programmer.

dodobirdlord 6y ago
> Go doesn’t have all that much to offer a C++ programmer. Concurrency and parallelism without debugging hell is huge.
- gumby 6y ago
  C++ will be getting a concurrency model, likely in C++23. As with other language features the position papers and implementations refer not only with their authors’ experience with C++ efforts (libuv, asio, pthreads) but other languages as well, such as go.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  C++20 offers both with very nice graphical debuggers, which Delve isn't really a match for.
  - abjKT26nO8 6y ago
    What graphical debuggers for C++ do you recommend?
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Visual C++ ones.
      - abjKT26nO8 6y ago
        That's not really an option for me when I debug C++ that is run on a Linux or Android TV. It also wouldn't be an option when I used to work with C++ that was used on Linux servers. That's a big chunk of C++ use. While I have your attention, I see your comments here in C++ threads quite often. You seem to like the language and at the same time you have some experience with simpler languages like Oberon. My experience with C++ has been that people happily go on to create giant inheritance hierarchies, with no restraint for multiple inheritance to the point that it's so unmanagable that nobody knows where things go and what actually happens. With all that inheritance, they lose track that the same thing has actually been copied tens of times between different classes and now these tens of classes have code that is basically copy-pasted and who knows what benefit anyone has from all this inheritance. Google engineers are one of the offenders when it comes to overuse of inheritance. Then, modern C++ allegedly fixes some warts, but IME it introduces more of them. E.g. the initialization fiasco (I honestly can't say with 100% confidence what braces do when you initialize std::vector). Then there is this thing that when you create a lambda like so: [&] { ... } And then move it to a function which will create lambdas of this form, just with different captures: std::function<void()> create_lambda(args...) { return [&] { ... }; } The second version will crash later when you run the lambda. Because it turns out that "[&]" just copies the stack pointer and isn't syntactic sugar for enumerating all the variables that you capture. This was non-obvious to me and it was really hard to track down the first time I encountered this problem. I think "[&]" is broken. Similarly, std::thread crashing in destructor when the user doesn't call std::thread::join, nor std::thread::detach. The ambiguity of syntax... I just don't buy that "modern C++" makes things particularly better. It sometimes makes them worse. Don't you experience the same fatigue as I do? EDIT: Oh, I just remembered another thing: at a previous job we discovered that MinGW's implementation of std::random_device just returned 0 every time. It is major facepalm for MinGW, but also for the C++ standard for making this behaviour allowed (yes, it's actually compliant with the standard). And even after it was fixed, there are still systematic issues with this whole randomness API. E.g. you can't actually seed it properly[1]. [1]: https://codingnest.com/generating-random-numbers-using-c-standard-library-the-problems/ https://codingnest.com/generating-random-numbers-using-c-sta...
- adev_ 6y ago
  > Concurrency and parallelism without debugging hell is huge. There is plenty of libraries in C++ that haves you concurrency and parallelism without debugging hell. Hell in concurrent code comes when you have shared state, and that is valid for both Go and C++. Using shared Golang Map in multi-threaded code is a very good example of deathtrap, even if it's in Go.

vips7L 6y ago

Swift? I didn't know it had much use outside of mac/iOS. It seems like a cool language otherwise.

_bxg1 6y ago
It just recently got official support for Windows and Linux, and it had low-key Linux support for a while before that. I've heard of people writing web servers in it. Like Go, it compiles directly to native machine code.
- vips7L 6y ago
  Isn't it still slower than GO because of referencing counting?
  - _bxg1 6y ago
    Depends what you mean by slow. Go is garbage-collected, Swift is reference-counted. Each has advantages and disadvantages. But also, that doesn't apply to stack-allocated values. It's not as simple as one being faster than the other.

pjmlp 6y ago

The only thing keeping C around are FOSS UNIX clones and embedded developers that are religiously stuck with C89 and their PIC compiler extensions. Even Arduino like boards use C++ nowadays. Unity and Godot have their graphics engine written in C++. Rust, Swift are dependent on LLVM, written in C++. Go, it isn't really in the same league of programmer expressiveness.

worik 6y ago
I have spend the quarantine hacking in C. On FreeCIV. Still used lots and lots of places
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Same can be said by any programming language, C is the Cobol of systems programming languages, so as long as there UNIX FOSS clones it won't go away.
- hannofcart 6y ago
  Freeciv fan here. What are you working on in it?
  - worik 6y ago
    Forked Attitude AI and making a rules based AI
saagarjha 6y ago
There are lots of performance sensitive tools, language runtimes, and cross-platform libraries written in C.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  And even more written in C++. Should we start counting which ones?
  - 6y ago