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In Defense of C++

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185 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 16 Sep 25 19:40 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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summerlight ◴[17 Sep 25 01:43 UTC] No.45270585[source]▶
> in C++, you can write perfectly fine code without ever needing to worry about the more complex features of the language. You can write simple, readable, and maintainable code in C++ without ever needing to use templates, operator overloading, or any of the other more advanced features of the language.

Only if you have full control on what others are writing. In reality, you're going to read a lot, lots of "clever" codes. And I'm saying as a person who have written a good amount of template meta programming codes. Even for me, some codes take hours to understand and I was usually able to cut 90% of its code after that.

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zzrrt ◴[17 Sep 25 03:10 UTC] No.45271179[source]▶
I’m probably guilty of gratuitous template stuff, because it adds fun to the otherwise boring code I spend a lot of time on. But I feel like the 90% cutdowns are when someone used copy-paste instead of templates, overloads, and inheritance. I don’t think both problems happen at the same time, though, or maybe I misunderstood.
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summerlight ◴[17 Sep 25 05:22 UTC] No.45272028[source]▶
When people are obsessed with over-abstraction and over-generalization, you can often see FizzBuzz Enterprise in action where a single switch statement is more than enough.
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account42 ◴[17 Sep 25 09:59 UTC] No.45273839[source]▶
I see that more with inheritance including pure virtual interface for things that only have one implementation and actor patterns that make the execution flow unnecessarily hard to follow. Basically, Java written in C++.

Most templates are much easier to read in comparison.

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1. summerlight ◴[17 Sep 25 17:03 UTC] No.45278475[source]▶
Agreed that template itself is not the problem but people are. It is still arguable that template is much more of fun to write clever codes because of its meta programming capability as well as its runtime performance advantages.

With a pure virtual interface you can at least track down the execution path as long as you can spot down where the object is created, but with template black magics? Good luck. Static dispatch with all those type traits and SFINAE practically makes it impossible to know before running it. Concept was supposed to solve this but this won't automatically solve all those problems lurking in legacy codes.