4 ms·

"Good luck doing it. It's not easy. I know; I've tried" Completely unsupported assertion (no pun) without evidence. Other people have tried it, and have succe

"Good luck doing it. It's not easy. I know; I've tried" Completely unsupported assertion (no pun) without evidence. Other people have tried it, and have succeeded. I could start listing all the software written in C++ that you use in your everyday life, perhaps 100's of times a day... but that'll quickly exhaust my word limit for this post. "That's why C++ is overly cumbersome unless you ignore most of its capabilities, like exceptions." Complete non sequitur. Exceptions are not "most of C++ capabilities". In fact, you can refuse to catch or throw exceptions for 99% of your (millions of lines) of code and still end up with a very large, stable code base running a large portion of the internet. Ask Google. Today, there's pretty much no viable alternative to C++ for writing large scale, high performance systems with reliable performance guarantees. You could do it in C if you have a religious anti-C++ agenda but that would be like cutting off your nose to spite your face, and you'll end up in a horrible mish-mash of macros and generated code all over the place for a project with any level of complexity. Rust or D might get there some day if they manage to attract a solid community and big corporate backing. But they are certainly not there yet.

lmm 12y ago
> you can refuse to catch or throw exceptions for 99% of your (millions of lines) of code and still end up with a very large, stable code base running a large portion of the internet. The point is that these features are infectious. If you don't want to throw exceptions, how do you handle a failure in a constructor? And then if you abandon constructors, other C++ features are unusable without them. And so on.
- rozim 12y ago
  Googler here. We avoid doing "work" in constructors as per the style guide: http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.xml#Doing_Work_in_Constructors http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.x...
  - lmm 12y ago
    Yeah, that's pretty much what you have to do, and go back to a C-style init method. But then you've lost the benefits of RAII, and you can't necessarily use those types with templates (which won't know about your init method).
vog 12y ago
> Exceptions are not "most of C++ capabilities". To add to this point: There are C++ frameworks such as Qt who don't use exceptions at all! And what impressed most: When writing a Qt application, you don't even miss exceptions. You don't have to resort to C-style return value checking all over your code. How is that? It took me some time to figure this out, but I believe it is because Qt applies the "Null Object" pattern consequently - down to the deepest depth of their framework,
sillysaurus3 12y ago
You could do it in C if you have a religious anti-C++ agenda but that would be like cutting off your nose to spite your face, and you'll end up in a horrible mish-mash of macros and generated code all over the place for a project with any level of complexity. Have a look at Tarsnap's source code.
wfunction 12y ago
Actually that statement has a point. Have you ever tried implementing std::vector and java.util.ArrayList and comparing the two implementations? One of them is trivial, the other one is most certainly not. One of the reasons is exception-safety guarantees. I'll leave it for you to figure out which is which.

lmm 12y ago

> you can refuse to catch or throw exceptions for 99% of your (millions of lines) of code and still end up with a very large, stable code base running a large portion of the internet. The point is that these features are infectious. If you don't want to throw exceptions, how do you handle a failure in a constructor? And then if you abandon constructors, other C++ features are unusable without them. And so on.

rozim 12y ago
Googler here. We avoid doing "work" in constructors as per the style guide: http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.xml#Doing_Work_in_Constructors http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.x...
- lmm 12y ago
  Yeah, that's pretty much what you have to do, and go back to a C-style init method. But then you've lost the benefits of RAII, and you can't necessarily use those types with templates (which won't know about your init method).

vog 12y ago

> Exceptions are not "most of C++ capabilities". To add to this point: There are C++ frameworks such as Qt who don't use exceptions at all! And what impressed most: When writing a Qt application, you don't even miss exceptions. You don't have to resort to C-style return value checking all over your code. How is that? It took me some time to figure this out, but I believe it is because Qt applies the "Null Object" pattern consequently - down to the deepest depth of their framework,

sillysaurus3 12y ago

You could do it in C if you have a religious anti-C++ agenda but that would be like cutting off your nose to spite your face, and you'll end up in a horrible mish-mash of macros and generated code all over the place for a project with any level of complexity. Have a look at Tarsnap's source code.

wfunction 12y ago

Actually that statement has a point. Have you ever tried implementing std::vector and java.util.ArrayList and comparing the two implementations? One of them is trivial, the other one is most certainly not. One of the reasons is exception-safety guarantees. I'll leave it for you to figure out which is which.