3 ms·

People bring this point up every time C++ is criticized, but no, not all C++ shortcomings come from its age. In fact, most of the shortcomings it is criticized

People bring this point up every time C++ is criticized, but no, not all C++ shortcomings come from its age. In fact, most of the shortcomings it is criticized for today are new. The committee just keeps on adding new ones: initialization (mentioned by another reply to my comment), std::optional & std::variant (UB), concepts[1], std::thread (good luck debugging where the std::thread which crashes your program in a destructor came from), std::random_device()() being allowed to return 0 every time (which e.g. won't show up when you compile for your own machine, but will when you cross-compile) and probably many others which I don't remember off the top of my head. [1]: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28098153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28098153> But back to the point, my original comment wasn't about C++ being a bad choice. It was about STL. You can use C++ without STL. I pointed to one alternative: abseil.

qalmakka 5y ago
It does indirectly come from age, because legacy and backward compatibility mean that you can't simply change some core parts of the language at all. For instance, std::optional uses UB because _all_ of C++ does the same, and making std::optional<T>::operator* different from std::unique_ptr<T>::operator* would have caused similar concepts to have a different behaviour - something that would have definitely translated into weird bugs. Also, C++ hasn't features like built-in move semantics and borrow checking, so it's very hard to enforce certain things that just come natural in Rust. That's simply stating a fact. The real point here is that std::optional<T> is much less likely to cause UB than a plain, old C pointer, so it's a net improvement - even though it could still lead to UB in some circumstances.

3 ms·

People bring this point up every time C++ is criticized, but no, not all C++ shortcomings come from its age. In fact, most of the shortcomings it is criticized

by yakubin 5y ago

qalmakka 5y ago
It does indirectly come from age, because legacy and backward compatibility mean that you can't simply change some core parts of the language at all. For instance, std::optional uses UB because _all_ of C++ does the same, and making std::optional<T>::operator* different from std::unique_ptr<T>::operator* would have caused similar concepts to have a different behaviour - something that would have definitely translated into weird bugs. Also, C++ hasn't features like built-in move semantics and borrow checking, so it's very hard to enforce certain things that just come natural in Rust. That's simply stating a fact. The real point here is that std::optional<T> is much less likely to cause UB than a plain, old C pointer, so it's a net improvement - even though it could still lead to UB in some circumstances.