2 ms·

Lest I come across as grousing without contributing to the discussion, let's take a peek at the author's main point on hidden costs. Most of the argument revol

Lest I come across as grousing without contributing to the discussion, let's take a peek at the author's main point on hidden costs. Most of the argument revolves around objects. There are two ways you can run into "hidden" surprises with objects in C++ that the author is pointing out. One involves failing to use the language features given, the other involves writing some seriously odd code. class C { public: /*explicit*/ C( int ); // Adding explicit avoids hidden costs // This combination (or something like it) is lethal. C( int, double ); operator bool() const; }; So for the author's code to have hidden performance concerns, they would need a constructor taking two parameters of the proper type and an automatic conversion operator that converts to a type assignable as their result. Basically, the stars have to align right and you have to knowingly write some dangerous code. Don't get me wrong, you can hide costs pretty easily in C++ and write some atrocious code. But usually this issue is alleviated by following basic best practices. The hard part is knowing what those best practices are.

strlen 14y ago
Making the copy constructor and operator= private (see boost::noncopyable to take care some of that boilerplate) takes care of some of the other hidden costs. I do agree that C++ is a complex and hodgepodge language, but I am not sure there are acceptable alternatives yet. It would be great if JVM had native support for value types, i.e., a way to use manual memory management, bypass bounds checks, or call native code without incurring serialization costs. Yes, I am aware that C# does this (and I like C# and F# a great deal as languages), but a) I am not deploying Windows in production b) Mono is not yet a viable high performance server side platform (it does look promising for desktop and mobile application or for simpler ASP.NET webapps). C is a beautiful and simple language (one I have strong affinity for) but manually implementing vtables is a bit painful (see a large pure C project for an example of that), nor is there any support for type-safe generic programming (which is an issue I have with Go as well -- even though I fully understand their reasons for omitting generics).

strlen 14y ago

Making the copy constructor and operator= private (see boost::noncopyable to take care some of that boilerplate) takes care of some of the other hidden costs. I do agree that C++ is a complex and hodgepodge language, but I am not sure there are acceptable alternatives yet. It would be great if JVM had native support for value types, i.e., a way to use manual memory management, bypass bounds checks, or call native code without incurring serialization costs. Yes, I am aware that C# does this (and I like C# and F# a great deal as languages), but a) I am not deploying Windows in production b) Mono is not yet a viable high performance server side platform (it does look promising for desktop and mobile application or for simpler ASP.NET webapps). C is a beautiful and simple language (one I have strong affinity for) but manually implementing vtables is a bit painful (see a large pure C project for an example of that), nor is there any support for type-safe generic programming (which is an issue I have with Go as well -- even though I fully understand their reasons for omitting generics).