4 ms·

Given that games more or less have to implement their own OS, I hope I'm not completely crazy yet ;) I am not talking about "business apps" (whatever that is).

by groby_b 17y ago

Given that games more or less have to implement their own OS, I hope I'm not completely crazy yet ;) I am not talking about "business apps" (whatever that is). I'm talking about down-to-the-metal resource management, task scheduling, etc. I could probably live with those issues in the higher logic layers (although I'd argue a scripting language would make you much more efficient there). But the underlying "OS" as well as computationally intensive tasks do not benefit from C++ that much, and it causes a lot of collateral damage.

timr 17y ago
" But the underlying "OS" as well as computationally intensive tasks do not benefit from C++ that much, and it causes a lot of collateral damage." No. C++ has some pretty huge advantages for performance-critical software. Generic programming makes it possible to write extremely succinct, high-performance code. Operator overloading allows the creation of vector and matrix libraries that look like real mathematical expressions, while evaluating to code that's as fast as anything you'll get from Fortran. I didn't write "business apps" (not sure where you got that). I wrote software that simulated proteins -- in other words, high-performance computing -- and except for FORTRAN, C++ was the best choice for the job. Doing the equivalent optimizations of a library like Boost::MPL in C is a nightmare of pointer arithmetic. When you throw in the fact that C++ makes it easy to avoid the memory leak, corruption and type safety issues that plague C code, you can easily see why C++ is becoming the language of choice in the HPC world.
- groby_b 17y ago
  _why C++ is becoming the language of choice in the HPC world._ And yet, the HPC world looks for a new language: http://www.cs.sandia.gov/Conferences/SOS10/presentations/Tuesday/Snir.pdf http://www.cs.sandia.gov/Conferences/SOS10/presentations/Tue... And a lot of the HPC world still writes FORTRAN or C. (I.e. BLAS, LAPACK, et.al.) But then again, I don't spend that much time in the true HPC world. Maybe I'm missing a trend there. But from the outside, it looks like C++ is not quite what people wanted.
  - timr 17y ago
    The HPC world writes a lot of code in FORTRAN because of the library support, and the fact that there's a ton of legacy FORTRAN code that's genuinely hard to rewrite. There isn't much C work going on; the few C libraries that exist are usually wrappers around FORTRAN code.

by groby_b 17y ago

timr 17y ago

" But the underlying "OS" as well as computationally intensive tasks do not benefit from C++ that much, and it causes a lot of collateral damage." No. C++ has some pretty huge advantages for performance-critical software. Generic programming makes it possible to write extremely succinct, high-performance code. Operator overloading allows the creation of vector and matrix libraries that look like real mathematical expressions, while evaluating to code that's as fast as anything you'll get from Fortran. I didn't write "business apps" (not sure where you got that). I wrote software that simulated proteins -- in other words, high-performance computing -- and except for FORTRAN, C++ was the best choice for the job. Doing the equivalent optimizations of a library like Boost::MPL in C is a nightmare of pointer arithmetic. When you throw in the fact that C++ makes it easy to avoid the memory leak, corruption and type safety issues that plague C code, you can easily see why C++ is becoming the language of choice in the HPC world.

groby_b 17y ago
_why C++ is becoming the language of choice in the HPC world._ And yet, the HPC world looks for a new language: http://www.cs.sandia.gov/Conferences/SOS10/presentations/Tuesday/Snir.pdf http://www.cs.sandia.gov/Conferences/SOS10/presentations/Tue... And a lot of the HPC world still writes FORTRAN or C. (I.e. BLAS, LAPACK, et.al.) But then again, I don't spend that much time in the true HPC world. Maybe I'm missing a trend there. But from the outside, it looks like C++ is not quite what people wanted.
- timr 17y ago
  The HPC world writes a lot of code in FORTRAN because of the library support, and the fact that there's a ton of legacy FORTRAN code that's genuinely hard to rewrite. There isn't much C work going on; the few C libraries that exist are usually wrappers around FORTRAN code.