In Defense of C++

When I made a meme about C++ [1] I was purposeful in choosing the iceberg format. To me it's not quite satisfying to say that C++ is merely complex or vast. A more fitting word would be "arcane", "monumental" or "titanic" (get it?). There's a specific feeling you get when you're trying to understand what the hell is an xvalue, why std::move doesn't move or why std::remove doesn't remove.

The Forest Gump C++ is another meme that captures this feeling very well (not by me) [2].

What it comes down to is developer experience (DX), and C++ has a terrible one. Down to syntax and all the way up to package management a C++ developper feels stuck to a time before they were born. At least we have a lot of time to think about all that while our code compiles. But that might just be the price for all the power it gives you.

[1] https://victorpoughon.github.io/cppiceberg/

[2] https://mikelui.io/img/c++_init_forest.gif

If I'm writing a small utility or something the Makefile typically looks something like this:

    CC=clang
    PACKAGES=libcurl libturbojpeg
    CFLAGS=-Wall -pedantic --std=gnu17 -g $(shell pkg-config --cflags $(PACKAGES))
    LDLIBS=$(shell pkg-config --libs $(PACKAGES))

    ALL: imagerunner

    imagerunner: imagerunner.o image_decoder.o downloader.o

- Use a build system like make, you can't just `c++ build`

- Understand that C++ compilers by default have no idea where most things are, you have to tell them exactly where to search

- Use an external tool that's not your build system or compiler to actually inform the compiler what those search paths are

- Oh also understand the compiler doesn't actually output what you want, you also need a linker

- That linker also doesn't know where to find things, so you need the external tool to use it

- Oh and you still have to use a package manager to install those dependencies to work with pkg-config, and it will install them globally. If you want to use it in different projects you better hope you're ok with them all sharing the same version.

Now you can see why things like IDEs became default tools for teaching students how to write C and C++, because there's no "open a text editor and then `c++ build file.cpp` to get output" for anything except hello world examples.

The whole point of pkg-config is to tell the compiler where those packages are.

I mean yeah, that's the point of having a tool like that. It's fine that the compiler doesn't know that, because its job is turning source into executables, not being the OS glue.

I'm not sure "having a linker" is a weakness? What are talking about?

It is true that you need to use the package manager to install the dependencies. This is more effort than having a package manager download them for you automatically, but on the other hand you don't end up in a situation where you need virtual environments for every application because they've all downloaded slightly different versions of the same packages. It's a bit of a philosophical argument as to what is the better solution.

The argument that it is too hard for students seems a bit overblown. The instructions for getting this up and running are:

    1. apt install build-essential
    2. extract the example files (Makefile and c file), cd into the directory
    3. type "make"
    4. run your program with ./programname

    HEADERS=headerA.h headerB.h headerC.h

    file1.o: $(HEADERS)
    file2.o: $(HEADERS)
    file3.o: $(HEADERS)