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This is a comparison with C that I am familiar with. It illustrates the reasons why C++ won for many applications (compared to C). The author also is on recor

This is a comparison with C that I am familiar with. It illustrates the reasons why C++ won for many applications (compared to C). The author also is on record as someone who hates C++, and is very careful about not making any claims in that blog post about C++ because that's not his area of expertise. Compared to C, where a data structure library is at best a heap of cobbled-together macros that make a lot of assumptions about the underlying types, C++ has well-developed libraries for all of the data structures mentioned. And you need to trust the author plenty to make a btree that works - that is a very complicated data structure. It's not just about memory safety, there can be a lot of functional bugs, too. The author of the C++ one is Google/Facebook, who I trust to write a solid library, while the author of the Rust one is someone who was inspired by the C++ version. At this point, both are well-tested, but there are a lot of Rust libs that are in the same position, but relatively untested.

bcantrill 4y ago
True: not my area of expertise as I have only written ~100,000 lines of C++ -- and that that is insufficient for C++ to be an area of expertise is itself very revealing...
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  It's true, and it is a big problem with C++. I'm not sure if you were being sarcastic here, but if those 100,000 lines are not heavily back-weighted towards 2014 and later, that amount of code probably doesn't make you a C++ expert unless you were doing things like writing parts of boost (or another template library) or you happened to decide to read a few hundred pages of the spec recently. The language-change whiplash that people accuse Rust of happens to C++ folks who leave the language for several years, since "idiomatic" C++ has changed substantially over the last 20 years. EDIT - Just to clarify, there are SO MANY different ways to do things in C++ that the way to really learn C++ is by reading (both good code and the spec), not by writing. It's very easy to write a ton of code and not actually do it in the fastest/best/most idiomatic way. This is complicated by the fact that a ton of C++ examples out there are wrong. It's really an electrical engineer's language at this point - read all the datasheets if you want to avoid getting shot in the foot (and still get shot in the foot anyway).

bcantrill 4y ago

True: not my area of expertise as I have only written ~100,000 lines of C++ -- and that that is insufficient for C++ to be an area of expertise is itself very revealing...

pclmulqdq 4y ago
It's true, and it is a big problem with C++. I'm not sure if you were being sarcastic here, but if those 100,000 lines are not heavily back-weighted towards 2014 and later, that amount of code probably doesn't make you a C++ expert unless you were doing things like writing parts of boost (or another template library) or you happened to decide to read a few hundred pages of the spec recently. The language-change whiplash that people accuse Rust of happens to C++ folks who leave the language for several years, since "idiomatic" C++ has changed substantially over the last 20 years. EDIT - Just to clarify, there are SO MANY different ways to do things in C++ that the way to really learn C++ is by reading (both good code and the spec), not by writing. It's very easy to write a ton of code and not actually do it in the fastest/best/most idiomatic way. This is complicated by the fact that a ton of C++ examples out there are wrong. It's really an electrical engineer's language at this point - read all the datasheets if you want to avoid getting shot in the foot (and still get shot in the foot anyway).