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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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ryao ◴[17 Sep 25 02:58 UTC] No.45271102[source]▶
GCC was originally written in GNU C. Around GCC 4.9, its developers decided to switch to a subset of C++ to use certain features, but if you look at the codebase, you will see that much of it is still GNU C, compiled as GNU C++.

There is nothing you can do in C++ that you cannot do in C due to Turing Completeness. Many common things have ways of being done in C that work equally well or even better. For example, you can use balanced binary search trees in C without type errors creating enormous error messages from types that are sentences if not paragraphs long. Just grab BSD’s sys/tree.h, illumnos’ libuutil or glib for some easy to use balanced binary search trees in C.

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1. AdieuToLogic ◴[17 Sep 25 04:08 UTC] No.45271556[source]▶
Where C macros provide functionality C++ classes and/or templates cannot is stringification of their argument(s).

For example:

  #include <iostream>

  #define SQL(statement) #statement

  int main (int ac, const char *av[])
  {
   const char *select = SQL(select * from some_table);

   std::cout << select << std::endl;

   return 0;
  }