3 ms·

I think C++ is justified when you're constrained by CPU, RAM, or other resources. That is, if the limiting factor is development speed, or network traffic, or

I think C++ is justified when you're constrained by CPU, RAM, or other resources. That is, if the limiting factor is development speed, or network traffic, or waiting for user input, then C++ probably isn't going to be worth it. But if in your problem area you can get a competitive advantage by being faster, using less memory, or tightly controlling other resources, then C++ is probably the right choice. If you really need it, you can use some inline assembly too. For example, look at a VM's JIT compiler: it needs to capture a profile from a running application, analyze hotspots in that profile, recompile those on the fly to native code, and coordinate with the VM to swap that out on the fly. The more time and memory that is used to do all this, the slower every application on the VM will run. Since there's a very constrained environment, C++ is a good choice for JIT compilers. And if you look at the CLR/VES or JVM, they are indeed written in C++.

pkolaczk 12y ago
Fair enough. But the number of resource-constrained systems is pretty low these times. A phone, watch, dishwasher or xero machine are no longer resource-constrained. Also, C++ is not really shining IMHO in very-constrained environments - at least not "modern C++" dialect. Template-heavy libraries can blow up code-sizes pretty severely and dynamic memory allocation happening behind-the-scenes in the standard library is not free either. So for those very constrained systems, pure C or a very tiny subset of C++, i.e. C with classes, no exceptions, no templates, might be often a better choice.
- tfinniga 12y ago
  Yeah, I realize my view on this is a bit skewed. A lot of the examples people give where C++ is still justified are things that I have done in my career - image processing, video editing, rendering software, CAD software, solving large sparse matrix systems, etc. On the other hand, there is a reason why native apps are popular on the iPhone. Likewise, some games are programmed in high-level languages, but the performance advantage of C++ keeps it dominant in games. Between games and mobile devices, I'd say C++ isn't going anywhere any time soon. C++ can indeed be very bloated, like you say. On the other hand templates do allow for code reuse without the function call overhead.. I believe std::sort is faster than qsort. For me, if there was another language that was as well supported as C++ but allowed higher-level structures and programming methods, I'd be very much in favor of it. For now it looks like new versions of C++ are the closest there is. Nobody really likes C++ for its elegance, it's just a very practical choice.

pkolaczk 12y ago

Fair enough. But the number of resource-constrained systems is pretty low these times. A phone, watch, dishwasher or xero machine are no longer resource-constrained. Also, C++ is not really shining IMHO in very-constrained environments - at least not "modern C++" dialect. Template-heavy libraries can blow up code-sizes pretty severely and dynamic memory allocation happening behind-the-scenes in the standard library is not free either. So for those very constrained systems, pure C or a very tiny subset of C++, i.e. C with classes, no exceptions, no templates, might be often a better choice.

tfinniga 12y ago
Yeah, I realize my view on this is a bit skewed. A lot of the examples people give where C++ is still justified are things that I have done in my career - image processing, video editing, rendering software, CAD software, solving large sparse matrix systems, etc. On the other hand, there is a reason why native apps are popular on the iPhone. Likewise, some games are programmed in high-level languages, but the performance advantage of C++ keeps it dominant in games. Between games and mobile devices, I'd say C++ isn't going anywhere any time soon. C++ can indeed be very bloated, like you say. On the other hand templates do allow for code reuse without the function call overhead.. I believe std::sort is faster than qsort. For me, if there was another language that was as well supported as C++ but allowed higher-level structures and programming methods, I'd be very much in favor of it. For now it looks like new versions of C++ are the closest there is. Nobody really likes C++ for its elegance, it's just a very practical choice.