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In Defense of C++

(dayvster.com)
185 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 16 Sep 25 19:40 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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s20n ◴[17 Sep 25 02:54 UTC] No.45271070[source]▶
I believe most C++ gripes are a classic case of PEBKAC.

One of the most common complaints is the lack of a package manager. I think this stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of how the ecosystem works. Developers accustomed to language-specific dependency managers like npm or pip find it hard to grasp that for C++, the system's package manager (apt, dnf, brew) is the idiomatic way to handle dependencies.

Another perpetual gripe is that C++ is bad because it is overly complex and baroque, usually from C folks like Linus Torvalds[1]. It's pretty ironic, considering the very compiler they use for C (GCC), is written in C++ and not in C.

[1]: Torvalds' comment on C++ <https://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus>

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1. viraptor ◴[17 Sep 25 03:32 UTC] No.45271331[source]▶
> find it hard to grasp that for C++, the system's package manager (apt, dnf, brew) is the idiomatic way to handle dependencies.

It's really not about being hard to grasp. Once you need a different dependency version than the system provides, you can't easily do it. (Apart from manual copies) Even if the library has the right soname version preventing conflicts (which you can do in C, but not really C++ interfaces), you still have multiple versions of headers to deal with. You're losing features by not having a real package manager.