2 ms·

Maybe you're just an unusually talented coder, but I pay dearly for every little extra bit of C++ my code touches. It's often worth it, but never a freebie.

• mettamage 6y ago
  I'm distinguishing between a hobby perspective and a professional perspective. IMO that really depends on the project size and goal of the project. I've written a C++ project of about 1000 lines (algobot trader with some optimized data structures in keeping the order book consistent). I've written it in VS Code, used a GUI debugger and I haven't really paid for anything. Meanwhile, I have this friend that programs so much C++ that his mantra is "in C++ assume all tools are broken." When I hear his horror stories, oh dear! Heisenbugs come by every 2 to 3 months. So for small projects that aren't touching the lower OS/systems level parts, you're not paying any extra costs. However, the deeper and further you go, I'd fully agree.
  • fnord123 6y ago
    Are you sure you're not hitting heisenbugs every 2-3 months?
  • lmilcin 6y ago
    The issue is for small project you don't really require C++ over C. Because supposedly the price you pay for abstractions has better returns the larger the application is (and that is generally true). My largest C project was 60k lines of code. The code was very, very dense. It had a lot of functionality that had to be packed to as little code as possible (due to memory limitation). It had things like transactional log-based database working in very small, static amount of memory, point in time recovery (so if the application failed it could restore itself to a number of possible checkpoints before the failure), parsers for various protocols (BER-TLV, for example), a lot of cryptography and custom cryptographic protocols, a GUI framework for a small monochromatic screen and keypad, drivers for a bunch of devices (thermal printer, external pinpad, etc.), SSL, a lot of business logic, state machines for talking to a network host, etc.
• varajelle 6y ago
  What are these costs? Performance costs? Most of C++ abstraction are zero costs. There is always the possibility of misusing them, but you can also misuse C libraries. Learning costs? This is compensated by the fact that you don't have to re learn each project convention in C to emulate the same feature. Compile time costs? Yeah, that can be annoying. Costs of more bugs? In my experience, the better type system makes it unlikely.
  • Y_Y 6y ago
    Introducing complexity into the build system, error messages, my mental model, interoperation between different parts of the code, other developers are often unfamiliar with less popular parts of the language, modern stuff especially sucks for portability between compilers and OSes. That's just my experience of course, and it doesn't mean I don't profit from writing and selling cpp-based software every day.
  • publicola1990 6y ago
    Yes, also the huge benefits C++ offers in structuring large programs makes it well worth it to switch, even if one does not want the more fancy features of it.