3 ms·

C++ has evolved a lot in the THIRTY years that have (almost) passed since 1992.

xedrac 5y ago
Yes, it grew 30+ new appendages. Jokes aside, it has improved quite a bit with lambdas, move semantics, type inference, standardized filesystem api, smart pointers, optional types, etc... Despite this, it still can't come close to offering the confidence that Rust gives you.
- brundolf 5y ago
  The most important trait of a language, especially when safety is a high concern, is what it doesn't let you do. And it's virtually impossible to improve on that axis down the line while maintaining backwards-compatibility, which means that ship has sailed for C++ no matter what new features get added.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    True, yet despite all security talk, Google, Apple and Microsoft rather improve C and C++ instead of just throwing away 50 years of libraries, OS code and GPGPU tooling. So while I enjoy doing toy applications in Rust, C++ is the language I have available on the IDE installer to write native code on our projects. Until Rust manages to get a similar checkbox on the same installer, it isn't going to be an option for certain kinds of corporations.
blippage 5y ago
A few years ago I tried out VC++ version 4 (??) for a bit of a laugh. And I felt no wonder as to why C++ got such a bad wrap. The MFC classes seemed to have suffered from gold-plating the specifications, and there was all sorts of casting stuff to cajole C++ into interfacing with the C windowing system. Since then, C++ has gotten massively better. We now have strings and vectors as part of the standard library, so there's no need to use someone's quirky implementation. As I said in a previous post, C++ gets you most of the way to Python, so there's really no point in not using it. Still, it's taken us until C++17 to get sum-types (via variants), and it is amazing to think that it took so long to get such a basic idea included. The handling of variants could do with a bit of simplification, mind. And I'd do wish they could implement the equivalent of "typeclasses", enabling recursive data structures. I'm a big C++ fan, in case that wasn't clear.
TheMonarchist 5y ago
C++ is the most popular programming language. It overtook Python in the number of active developers this month: https://www.openhub.net/languages/compare?utf8=%E2%9C%93&measure=contributors&language_name%5B%5D=c&language_name%5B%5D=cpp&language_name%5B%5D=java&language_name%5B%5D=javascript&language_name%5B%5D=shell&language_name%5B%5D=python&language_name%5B%5D=-1&commit=Update https://www.openhub.net/languages/compare?utf8=%E2%9C%93&mea... It's share of developers has been growing since early 2013, when C++11 began to be widely available, and more recent revisions have apparently boosted its growth.

Yes, it grew 30+ new appendages. Jokes aside, it has improved quite a bit with lambdas, move semantics, type inference, standardized filesystem api, smart pointers, optional types, etc... Despite this, it still can't come close to offering the confidence that Rust gives you.

brundolf 5y ago
The most important trait of a language, especially when safety is a high concern, is what it doesn't let you do. And it's virtually impossible to improve on that axis down the line while maintaining backwards-compatibility, which means that ship has sailed for C++ no matter what new features get added.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  True, yet despite all security talk, Google, Apple and Microsoft rather improve C and C++ instead of just throwing away 50 years of libraries, OS code and GPGPU tooling. So while I enjoy doing toy applications in Rust, C++ is the language I have available on the IDE installer to write native code on our projects. Until Rust manages to get a similar checkbox on the same installer, it isn't going to be an option for certain kinds of corporations.

blippage 5y ago

A few years ago I tried out VC++ version 4 (??) for a bit of a laugh. And I felt no wonder as to why C++ got such a bad wrap. The MFC classes seemed to have suffered from gold-plating the specifications, and there was all sorts of casting stuff to cajole C++ into interfacing with the C windowing system. Since then, C++ has gotten massively better. We now have strings and vectors as part of the standard library, so there's no need to use someone's quirky implementation. As I said in a previous post, C++ gets you most of the way to Python, so there's really no point in not using it. Still, it's taken us until C++17 to get sum-types (via variants), and it is amazing to think that it took so long to get such a basic idea included. The handling of variants could do with a bit of simplification, mind. And I'd do wish they could implement the equivalent of "typeclasses", enabling recursive data structures. I'm a big C++ fan, in case that wasn't clear.

TheMonarchist 5y ago

C++ is the most popular programming language. It overtook Python in the number of active developers this month: https://www.openhub.net/languages/compare?utf8=%E2%9C%93&measure=contributors&language_name%5B%5D=c&language_name%5B%5D=cpp&language_name%5B%5D=java&language_name%5B%5D=javascript&language_name%5B%5D=shell&language_name%5B%5D=python&language_name%5B%5D=-1&commit=Update https://www.openhub.net/languages/compare?utf8=%E2%9C%93&mea... It's share of developers has been growing since early 2013, when C++11 began to be widely available, and more recent revisions have apparently boosted its growth.