4 ms·

I tend to take everything Linus says with a grain of salt. Not because he's wrong, or because he doesn't know what he's talking about, but there's enough of the

I tend to take everything Linus says with a grain of salt. Not because he's wrong, or because he doesn't know what he's talking about, but there's enough of the puckish troll in him that I tend to read his posts more with an eye to their intended effect, than to what he's actually saying. There are plenty of applications for which c++ is a perfectly sensible language choice. Git isn't one of them.

mikeash 15y ago
If I understand what proponents of C++ say, C++ is supposed to be suited best for medium-level programming where abstraction is helpful but low-level constructs and speed are still helpful. It's supposed to give you many of the benefits of higher level languages while still giving you high performance. It's intended to be widely portable but still easily hook into special OS-specific facilities. This description sounds like an excellent language for git to me. And in fact, while I don't like C++ much in general, if properly managed, I think a project like git could do well if written in C++.
- dedward 15y ago
  It's that "if properly managed" bit that would be a nightmare from hell to manage... easier to just do it in C. What it's intended to do is rather different than what it's actually used for in real life..... code talks, anything else is just smoke, right? IF someone can come alnog and show us a better way in any language, then tehre's something to argue about, otehrwise, the guy who has working code wins over the guy without it, always.
  - mikeash 15y ago
    I guess what I'm really interested in here is, if git isn't an appropriate project for C++, just what is?
    - redthrowaway 15y ago
      AAA games, browsers... Really, anything where you need to have some abstraction but performance is still critical.
      - groby_b 15y ago
        There's a large faction in AAA games that thinks C++ is a stupid idea. It's debatable who's right in that debate, but good points are being raised. The problem is not so much that C++ is a worse language than C - it's that it makes it insanely easy to shoot yourself in the foot in hideously complex ways that take forever to unravel. See e.g. two phase name lookup - http://blog.llvm.org/2009/12/dreaded-two-phase-name-lookup.html http://blog.llvm.org/2009/12/dreaded-two-phase-name-lookup.h... There are plenty of other places where the design constraints of C++ have forced it into a dark corner on the edge of the realm of madness. It _does_ buy you additional abstraction, but there is a price you pay for that. Personally, I'm not happy with either camp. C shows its age - it's from the 70s - and C++ is just out of control. So I'll continue to use both unless there's a decent replacement. (I'm squinting at Go, Rust, and BitC - and none of them are quite what I'd like to see)
        andolanra 15y ago
        I might suggest taking a look at D. It's more or less C++ redesigned from the ground up by a C++ compiler writer, so it's much more consistent and a lot more pleasant to program in. I've had bad experiences with the third-party libraries, which were sometimes inconsistently documented and half-finished on account of the still unfortunately small community, but the standard libraries are excellent, especially everything that Andrei Alexandrescu has touched. For elaboration: http://drdobbs.com/article/print?articleId=217801225&siteSectionName= http://drdobbs.com/article/print?articleId=217801225&sit...
        Zardoz84 15y ago
        Say that doing metaprogramming in D is really fun and not a guru thing like in C++ .
- pavanky 15y ago
  The problem with C++ is, it is not language that has been built from scratch. It is just a layer upon layer upon layer upon C written by various people for various usecases. So there is no way to "properly manage" a C++ project. Unless it is maintained by one single person (or few like minded people)
  - tspiteri 15y ago
    I was going to disagree with you by saying that those layers are there for a reason; and they are there for a reason, mainly backwards compatibility. But thinking a bit more, I have to agree with you that still, those layers are the problem with C++. If you want to maintain old code, you would have to be conversant with loads of different idioms, it is as if you are maintaining multiple languages, starting from C and going on to the latest C++. To write new code, C++ can be very clean, and C++11 is a huge step in the right direction for this. But to maintain code, especially code written by someone else, C++ can be a little bit hard. And it can never be easier than maintaining C code, because maintaining C code is a subset of maintaining C++ code.
- hp 15y ago
  An alternative to C++ in this situation is to have a C core or set of C libraries, with bindings up to something like JavaScript or Lua. World of Warcraft, Emacs, Firefox are a few popular examples of that architecture. GNOME 3 works this way too. It's pretty important to have good automation for the C-to-high-level conversion, for example GNOME has a gobject-introspection to do this, and Firefox has XPCOM. Otherwise it becomes too tedious and bug-prone to be gluing two languages together by hand all the time. An old blog post http://blog.ometer.com/2008/08/25/embeddable-languages/ http://blog.ometer.com/2008/08/25/embeddable-languages/ I suppose node.js could be considered another example of this approach, by writing the super-tiny-and-fast event loop and http parser in C and then putting all the application logic in JavaScript.

mikeash 15y ago

If I understand what proponents of C++ say, C++ is supposed to be suited best for medium-level programming where abstraction is helpful but low-level constructs and speed are still helpful. It's supposed to give you many of the benefits of higher level languages while still giving you high performance. It's intended to be widely portable but still easily hook into special OS-specific facilities. This description sounds like an excellent language for git to me. And in fact, while I don't like C++ much in general, if properly managed, I think a project like git could do well if written in C++.

dedward 15y ago
It's that "if properly managed" bit that would be a nightmare from hell to manage... easier to just do it in C. What it's intended to do is rather different than what it's actually used for in real life..... code talks, anything else is just smoke, right? IF someone can come alnog and show us a better way in any language, then tehre's something to argue about, otehrwise, the guy who has working code wins over the guy without it, always.
- mikeash 15y ago
  I guess what I'm really interested in here is, if git isn't an appropriate project for C++, just what is?
  - redthrowaway 15y ago
    AAA games, browsers... Really, anything where you need to have some abstraction but performance is still critical.
    - groby_b 15y ago
      There's a large faction in AAA games that thinks C++ is a stupid idea. It's debatable who's right in that debate, but good points are being raised. The problem is not so much that C++ is a worse language than C - it's that it makes it insanely easy to shoot yourself in the foot in hideously complex ways that take forever to unravel. See e.g. two phase name lookup - http://blog.llvm.org/2009/12/dreaded-two-phase-name-lookup.html http://blog.llvm.org/2009/12/dreaded-two-phase-name-lookup.h... There are plenty of other places where the design constraints of C++ have forced it into a dark corner on the edge of the realm of madness. It _does_ buy you additional abstraction, but there is a price you pay for that. Personally, I'm not happy with either camp. C shows its age - it's from the 70s - and C++ is just out of control. So I'll continue to use both unless there's a decent replacement. (I'm squinting at Go, Rust, and BitC - and none of them are quite what I'd like to see)
      - andolanra 15y ago
        I might suggest taking a look at D. It's more or less C++ redesigned from the ground up by a C++ compiler writer, so it's much more consistent and a lot more pleasant to program in. I've had bad experiences with the third-party libraries, which were sometimes inconsistently documented and half-finished on account of the still unfortunately small community, but the standard libraries are excellent, especially everything that Andrei Alexandrescu has touched. For elaboration: http://drdobbs.com/article/print?articleId=217801225&siteSectionName= http://drdobbs.com/article/print?articleId=217801225&sit...
        Zardoz84 15y ago
        Say that doing metaprogramming in D is really fun and not a guru thing like in C++ .
pavanky 15y ago
The problem with C++ is, it is not language that has been built from scratch. It is just a layer upon layer upon layer upon C written by various people for various usecases. So there is no way to "properly manage" a C++ project. Unless it is maintained by one single person (or few like minded people)
- tspiteri 15y ago
  I was going to disagree with you by saying that those layers are there for a reason; and they are there for a reason, mainly backwards compatibility. But thinking a bit more, I have to agree with you that still, those layers are the problem with C++. If you want to maintain old code, you would have to be conversant with loads of different idioms, it is as if you are maintaining multiple languages, starting from C and going on to the latest C++. To write new code, C++ can be very clean, and C++11 is a huge step in the right direction for this. But to maintain code, especially code written by someone else, C++ can be a little bit hard. And it can never be easier than maintaining C code, because maintaining C code is a subset of maintaining C++ code.
hp 15y ago
An alternative to C++ in this situation is to have a C core or set of C libraries, with bindings up to something like JavaScript or Lua. World of Warcraft, Emacs, Firefox are a few popular examples of that architecture. GNOME 3 works this way too. It's pretty important to have good automation for the C-to-high-level conversion, for example GNOME has a gobject-introspection to do this, and Firefox has XPCOM. Otherwise it becomes too tedious and bug-prone to be gluing two languages together by hand all the time. An old blog post http://blog.ometer.com/2008/08/25/embeddable-languages/ http://blog.ometer.com/2008/08/25/embeddable-languages/ I suppose node.js could be considered another example of this approach, by writing the super-tiny-and-fast event loop and http parser in C and then putting all the application logic in JavaScript.