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I'm probably just biased, but to me the problem with modern C++ is its complexity. The mental model of the language, its syntax, and the amount of history / num

I'm probably just biased, but to me the problem with modern C++ is its complexity. The mental model of the language, its syntax, and the amount of history / number of interfaces a programmer needs to be familiar with to be productive are all too large. Rust isn't any more complex, but it's not radically simpler either. Carbon doesn't look like it solves this problem. It would seem that creating a language that is expressive, performant, and small while still general purpose is quite a challenge.

dzonga 4y ago
to me that's the greatest benefit of C++ and hence why it's so successful. it's kitchen sink language. choose what features you want. choose your own style. you wanna do OOP | DOP suit yourself. that versatility is why C++ is unmatched in terms of where it's deployed.
- robmccoll 4y ago
  The more recent editions of C++ do seem to support this idea. Things are at least better than when the trade off was taking advantage of C++ features (and more C++ like) or performance (and more C-like C++). The problem that there are only a handful of people who could realistically claim to be experts in C++ has gotten worse over time as the language has expanded though. It's a language where you potentially have to train new C++ programmers that join your team in how your team uses C++.
- est31 4y ago
  That's great if there is one developer working on each component of the software. The moment you have people trying to do cross-component changes, or developing someone else's component, they don't just have to learn how the code works on a domain level, but also the features of the language the code is using.
- cute_boi 4y ago
  Well upto certain limits versatility is important. But, being too versatile also brings more complexity and it makes language confusing. I read more code than I write, so this versatily is not good for people like me.
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  Isn't the 'kitchen sink' approach what ended up causing Perl to fade from relevance? I am only casually aware of this, and I may be totally misremembering things, but Perl used to be seen as a swiss army chainsaw but people eventually came to realize that maintenance was a nightmare.
  - fractalb 4y ago
    Perl faded away because there was an alternative (Python) and it was not a kitchen sink. For C++, there's no alternative at all. People have to bear with it.
    - kasabali 4y ago
      Ironically Python is now fast approaching the kitchen sink status.
    - robmccoll 4y ago
      I think Python's original take on kitchen sink was relatively small language with large "batteries included" standard library.
  - pornel 4y ago
    From my webby perspective mod_php has been the Perl killer, and PHP isn’t known for being lean either.
pkolaczk 4y ago
> Rust isn't any more complex, but it's not radically simpler either. Safe Rust doesn't have classes, inheritance, copy constructors, move constructors, header files, preprocessor, textual substitution macros, code executing before main(), exceptions, global variables, pointer arithmetic... Looks radically simpler to me.
- epicide 4y ago
  In general, I think it's easy to conflate simplicity with ease. Ease is always a matter of context and what one is familiar with. I agree that Rust is simpler than C++ and I think a lot of people mean that Rust isn't easier (up front). Given how new and different it can be, that makes sense.
  - htyden 4y ago
    Obligatory Rich Hickey plug: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4
    - moomin 4y ago
      That’s a great talk, but you have to wonder what that era Hickey would have made of overloading arity on list operations the way modern Clojure does.
- sudosysgen 4y ago
  Instead Rust has a borrow checker, procedural macros of different types, half a parallel language when using unsafe, etc... And by the way, Rust does have pointer arithmetic. It's not clear to me that either is simpler or easier. The big point of Rust is really memory safety, not ease of use or simplicity.
  - pitaj 4y ago
    Rust doesn't have pointer arithmetic in the same way that C and C++ do. All you can do with pointers in rust is offset them.
gpderetta 4y ago
A language in the niche of C++ is always going to be complex (see rust), although possibly not as complex as C++. I think that Carbon is not meant to be 100% backward compatible at least at this point, so they can iteratively try to smooth the rough edges of the language.
klaussilveira 4y ago
You can choose to be simple, expressive, performant and small with C++: https://gist.github.com/bkaradzic/2e39896bc7d8c34e042b https://gist.github.com/bkaradzic/2e39896bc7d8c34e042b
rkangel 4y ago
It's not inheriting the complexity though. That's sort of the whole goal - the next 'generation' of C++ that can be used interchangeably with actual C++ but allowing re-visiting most of the design decisions and throwing out old features. The Github Page[1] says this: "The best way to address these problems is to avoid inheriting the legacy of C or C++ directly, and instead start with solid language foundations like modern generics system, modular code organization, and consistent, simple syntax." [1] https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang
jandrewrogers 4y ago
It is difficult to tell sometimes due to its religious backward compatibility, but C++ has been becoming significantly less complex over time. I have a large C++ code base (originally hundreds of thousands LoC) that I aggressively modernize, essentially rewriting it idiomatically in new versions of C++. It was originally written in C++0x/C++11, rewritten in C++17, and is currently being rewritten in C++20. You can barely tell the code bases are related beyond being functionally similar. It is also important to separate C++ the language from its standard library. As C++ the language has modernized, it has dramatically reduced the lines of code to express a given thing. And the more modern way of expressing the thing has stronger type safety, more flexibility, and better composability. Things that used to require a lot of template metaprogramming magic to pull off are now clean one-liners. Particularly in C++20, which is probably the biggest step-change since C++11, metaprogramming is simultaneously much more powerful and much more readable. A lot of code that used to be written is now metaprogrammed. Previous use cases that required C macros largely have native C++ equivalents at this point. The major issue that makes C++ seem complex is the standard library, which was largely designed and written for legacy versions of C++. If you use the standard library heavily, it tends to want to be used in the style of C++ for which it was originally written. If you built a standard library for C++20 from first principles, it would look quite different from the one we have. Hence the proliferation of non-standard "standard" libraries for C++.
- kinjba11 4y ago
  > You can barely tell the code bases are related beyond being functionally similar. Not sure if you've missed this, but this is a number one reason many consider C++ absurdly complex. To actually know C++ is to know many different similar languages based on the year the code was written. C++20 is very different than C++03 as noted. Now compare this with C, or Go, Java, etc. which in comparison have barely changed.
- flakiness 4y ago
  I'm not sure your code is simplified either because of the modern features of C++ or because of the rewrite. That said, I like the idea of rewriting old C++ code with modern C++. That'd be also a good way to learn modern C++ in a practical way and having legacy code serves well for this context ;-)
2c2c2c 4y ago
This seems to be a very hard idea to convey to people. Zig is on the opposite extreme-- the mantra being "There must only be one way to do something". Ergonomics and simplicity seem to be overlooked aspects of programming language design

dzonga 4y ago

to me that's the greatest benefit of C++ and hence why it's so successful. it's kitchen sink language. choose what features you want. choose your own style. you wanna do OOP | DOP suit yourself. that versatility is why C++ is unmatched in terms of where it's deployed.

robmccoll 4y ago
The more recent editions of C++ do seem to support this idea. Things are at least better than when the trade off was taking advantage of C++ features (and more C++ like) or performance (and more C-like C++). The problem that there are only a handful of people who could realistically claim to be experts in C++ has gotten worse over time as the language has expanded though. It's a language where you potentially have to train new C++ programmers that join your team in how your team uses C++.
est31 4y ago
That's great if there is one developer working on each component of the software. The moment you have people trying to do cross-component changes, or developing someone else's component, they don't just have to learn how the code works on a domain level, but also the features of the language the code is using.
cute_boi 4y ago
Well upto certain limits versatility is important. But, being too versatile also brings more complexity and it makes language confusing. I read more code than I write, so this versatily is not good for people like me.
BitwiseFool 4y ago
Isn't the 'kitchen sink' approach what ended up causing Perl to fade from relevance? I am only casually aware of this, and I may be totally misremembering things, but Perl used to be seen as a swiss army chainsaw but people eventually came to realize that maintenance was a nightmare.
- fractalb 4y ago
  Perl faded away because there was an alternative (Python) and it was not a kitchen sink. For C++, there's no alternative at all. People have to bear with it.
  - kasabali 4y ago
    Ironically Python is now fast approaching the kitchen sink status.
  - robmccoll 4y ago
    I think Python's original take on kitchen sink was relatively small language with large "batteries included" standard library.
- pornel 4y ago
  From my webby perspective mod_php has been the Perl killer, and PHP isn’t known for being lean either.

pkolaczk 4y ago

> Rust isn't any more complex, but it's not radically simpler either. Safe Rust doesn't have classes, inheritance, copy constructors, move constructors, header files, preprocessor, textual substitution macros, code executing before main(), exceptions, global variables, pointer arithmetic... Looks radically simpler to me.

epicide 4y ago
In general, I think it's easy to conflate simplicity with ease. Ease is always a matter of context and what one is familiar with. I agree that Rust is simpler than C++ and I think a lot of people mean that Rust isn't easier (up front). Given how new and different it can be, that makes sense.
- htyden 4y ago
  Obligatory Rich Hickey plug: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4
  - moomin 4y ago
    That’s a great talk, but you have to wonder what that era Hickey would have made of overloading arity on list operations the way modern Clojure does.
sudosysgen 4y ago
Instead Rust has a borrow checker, procedural macros of different types, half a parallel language when using unsafe, etc... And by the way, Rust does have pointer arithmetic. It's not clear to me that either is simpler or easier. The big point of Rust is really memory safety, not ease of use or simplicity.
- pitaj 4y ago
  Rust doesn't have pointer arithmetic in the same way that C and C++ do. All you can do with pointers in rust is offset them.

gpderetta 4y ago

A language in the niche of C++ is always going to be complex (see rust), although possibly not as complex as C++. I think that Carbon is not meant to be 100% backward compatible at least at this point, so they can iteratively try to smooth the rough edges of the language.

klaussilveira 4y ago

You can choose to be simple, expressive, performant and small with C++: https://gist.github.com/bkaradzic/2e39896bc7d8c34e042b https://gist.github.com/bkaradzic/2e39896bc7d8c34e042b

rkangel 4y ago

It's not inheriting the complexity though. That's sort of the whole goal - the next 'generation' of C++ that can be used interchangeably with actual C++ but allowing re-visiting most of the design decisions and throwing out old features. The Github Page[1] says this: "The best way to address these problems is to avoid inheriting the legacy of C or C++ directly, and instead start with solid language foundations like modern generics system, modular code organization, and consistent, simple syntax." [1] https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang

jandrewrogers 4y ago

It is difficult to tell sometimes due to its religious backward compatibility, but C++ has been becoming significantly less complex over time. I have a large C++ code base (originally hundreds of thousands LoC) that I aggressively modernize, essentially rewriting it idiomatically in new versions of C++. It was originally written in C++0x/C++11, rewritten in C++17, and is currently being rewritten in C++20. You can barely tell the code bases are related beyond being functionally similar. It is also important to separate C++ the language from its standard library. As C++ the language has modernized, it has dramatically reduced the lines of code to express a given thing. And the more modern way of expressing the thing has stronger type safety, more flexibility, and better composability. Things that used to require a lot of template metaprogramming magic to pull off are now clean one-liners. Particularly in C++20, which is probably the biggest step-change since C++11, metaprogramming is simultaneously much more powerful and much more readable. A lot of code that used to be written is now metaprogrammed. Previous use cases that required C macros largely have native C++ equivalents at this point. The major issue that makes C++ seem complex is the standard library, which was largely designed and written for legacy versions of C++. If you use the standard library heavily, it tends to want to be used in the style of C++ for which it was originally written. If you built a standard library for C++20 from first principles, it would look quite different from the one we have. Hence the proliferation of non-standard "standard" libraries for C++.

kinjba11 4y ago
> You can barely tell the code bases are related beyond being functionally similar. Not sure if you've missed this, but this is a number one reason many consider C++ absurdly complex. To actually know C++ is to know many different similar languages based on the year the code was written. C++20 is very different than C++03 as noted. Now compare this with C, or Go, Java, etc. which in comparison have barely changed.
flakiness 4y ago
I'm not sure your code is simplified either because of the modern features of C++ or because of the rewrite. That said, I like the idea of rewriting old C++ code with modern C++. That'd be also a good way to learn modern C++ in a practical way and having legacy code serves well for this context ;-)

2c2c2c 4y ago

This seems to be a very hard idea to convey to people. Zig is on the opposite extreme-- the mantra being "There must only be one way to do something". Ergonomics and simplicity seem to be overlooked aspects of programming language design