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 | Posted by MrJay
in reply to Dukc |  Permalink Reply |
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MrJay 
| On Friday, 26 August 2022 at 21:16:20 UTC, Dukc wrote:
> C++ is meant as an advancement of C. And it's used as one. Dmd was written in C++ until version 2.069, and countless other programs, both open and closed source still use it. It makes sense - it's a superset of C (well, almost), so one can always fall back to C features when the more complex features of C++ don't justify themselves.
Yet, many of the most well-known and successful programmers don't see it like that. Can it be that C++ is so complex that even conservative use of it makes your codebase so unreadable that even the archaic C is a better choice? Think how crazy this is - the cream of of our profession resort to pointer / length pairs over std::vector, and copy-pasting the module name to every public declaration over using namespaces.
There has to be HUGE downsides in C++ for this competent people to resort to this drastic avoidance. They do say what the downsides of C++ are about: too big a language to learn well, so code ends up using features the reader does not know. Still, if this is the case one would think it had been long since generally aknowledged: C++ guidebooks would tell to avoid less-known language features absent strong reasons, and later languages ought to have more pressure to be more minimalist like Go and less "CISC" like D or Rust. Yet, complex D features like ranges (okay, more of a Phobos feature), operator overloading, CTFE, objects and templates don't seem to be commonly hated.
This inconsistency in our attitude towards language complexity is interesting in my opinion. I want to hear your opinions, would you rather use C or C++ in your job if you had to pick one ("it depends"-answers okay). But most importantly, why? What do you make of that C++ complexity seems to be so appreciated and so at contempt at the same time?
C and C++ is very complicated, I recently had to choose between C and C++, but I ended up choosing D instead. the reasons why are.
- to many baskets not enough eggs.
- Community designed complexity.
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To many baskets not enough eggs
C was designed to be a systems level programming language, it became a general purpose language because of community and industry effort, C++ was not designed to be anything it is an extension on C it was designed to be C plus extra features, as C++ became designed they want there cake and to eat it to, meaning that they want every good feature from many other popular languages like Haskell, or Python or whatever, however the difference between what D has done and C++ is doing that D was for the most part designed to Read fast Write fast and Run Fast, its on the home page, C++ is designed to be fast, and every other feature that C++ tries to add is just a bonus if they can even get it to work, for example I cant image C++ with a GC, however they talk about adding usability features, and it sure sounds like that would be a feature that would help their target audience, the designers talk about adding features to help scientists but its just talk unless they actually do it, and a GC would help, but they are not willing to make sacrifices to make a general purpose language, D is a general purpose language, it sacrifices Speed when it needs to when you want to just test an idea, but you can also make it as fast as C or C++. the design has clean edges even if its very broad, while C++ is also very broad but it has very rough edges.
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Community Designed complexity
When I tried to learn C++ the part that made me the most confused was the community, C style code tends to be faster than C++ style code, at least by my metrics and the metrics I have seen, so I want to use C to make faster programs, but I like many of the C++ libraries and some of the nice features, however when I go to learn C++ so much code is in C++ style as a beginner I really didnt want to decipher it all, so I just wanted to use C instead but then I find out about this awesome C++ library and the cycle continues, though this issue was self inflicted, all I had to do to fix the issue was to not care about how fast my code is, but that is the whole purpose of using C and C++, typically use that your code is fast. so why use C++ for ease of use, for me it was supposed to be for speed. so again like what I mentioned above its meant to be for speed but the code people write is because its "Correct" code, because that code according to someone is easier, which tends to be slower.
the community the language design in some ways.
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