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C++, especially before C++11, was a total mess. Even today, it's super easy to shoot yourself in the foot and you literally can't learn the entirety of the lang

C++, especially before C++11, was a total mess. Even today, it's super easy to shoot yourself in the foot and you literally can't learn the entirety of the language due to how massive it is. This still doesn't justify doing the absurdity of macro magic and garbage I've seen people pumping out in C over the years though. IMHO if you deliberately use C it's because you want to keep things simple. Sometimes C++ will inevitably lead to overcomplicated designs nobody needs; there's a reason why 90's C++ feels massively outdated, while 90's C is still (mostly) accessible. C is a great way to keep the urge people have to shovel in OOP even when it doesn't really make sense. When I see some bullshit C++ code at work, I often think, "if people had to write this in C, they wouldn't have overthought this this much"... My 2 cents is that there was a Java craze back in the '90s that basically infected all code designed in that time period, and that's how we got some very weird nonsense that in hindsight was poorly thought out. Just look at stuff like GTK+ and GObject...

galangalalgol 2y ago
I have been guilty of this if only in school. A class assignment could be completed in java or c and I knew c++ and c and my teammates knew c. I really wanted to do oop because I was ignorant, but none of us knew java so we did OO in c. It was horrible. I like the simplicity of c. I wish there was a zig that was immutable by default, and had a borrowchecker, but I think that road inevitably leads to a GC jitted language or to something as complicated as rust. Well almost as complicated, at least macros would still be written in the same syntax as normal runtime code.
bobajeff 2y ago
The GObject system for all it's faults serves a purpose. Similar to COM in Windows it allows mapping of higher level languages to libraries. Without it there wouldn't be all the bindings we have to Python, JavaScript, Vala and Rust today. I wouldn't say it was poorly thought out so much as mismatched with it's user's typical uses and expectations.
- qalmakka 2y ago
  Yeah but it made literally zero sense to write GObject in C. They've reimplemented inheritance and the like with macro BS while the GNU project literally had both a C++ and Objective-C compiler - Objective-C warts and all was a perfect fit for GObject.
  - bobajeff 2y ago
    It makes sense if you consider that it was created for making c libraries bindable to higher level languages. That's more a flaw in it's design rather than implementation. If they were to design such a system now I'd hope it would be designed as a language independent ABI, Runtime and IDL like the Wasm Component Model.

galangalalgol 2y ago

I have been guilty of this if only in school. A class assignment could be completed in java or c and I knew c++ and c and my teammates knew c. I really wanted to do oop because I was ignorant, but none of us knew java so we did OO in c. It was horrible. I like the simplicity of c. I wish there was a zig that was immutable by default, and had a borrowchecker, but I think that road inevitably leads to a GC jitted language or to something as complicated as rust. Well almost as complicated, at least macros would still be written in the same syntax as normal runtime code.

bobajeff 2y ago

The GObject system for all it's faults serves a purpose. Similar to COM in Windows it allows mapping of higher level languages to libraries. Without it there wouldn't be all the bindings we have to Python, JavaScript, Vala and Rust today. I wouldn't say it was poorly thought out so much as mismatched with it's user's typical uses and expectations.

qalmakka 2y ago
Yeah but it made literally zero sense to write GObject in C. They've reimplemented inheritance and the like with macro BS while the GNU project literally had both a C++ and Objective-C compiler - Objective-C warts and all was a perfect fit for GObject.
- bobajeff 2y ago
  It makes sense if you consider that it was created for making c libraries bindable to higher level languages. That's more a flaw in it's design rather than implementation. If they were to design such a system now I'd hope it would be designed as a language independent ABI, Runtime and IDL like the Wasm Component Model.