In Defense of C++

C++ and C rely, heavily, on skill and discipline instead of automated checks to stay safe. Over time, and in larger groups of people that always fails. People just aren't that disciplined and they get overconfident of their own skills (or level of discipline). Decades of endless memory leaks, buffer overflows, etc. and the related security issues, crash bugs, data corruption, etc. shows that no code base is really immune to this.

The best attitude in programmers (regardless of the language) is the awareness that "my code probably contains embarrassing bugs, I just haven't found them yet". Act accordingly.

There are of course lots of valid reasons to continue to use C/C++ on projects where it is used and there are a lot such projects. Rewrites are disruptive, time consuming, expensive, and risky.

It is true that there are ways in C++ to mitigate some of these issues. Mostly this boils down to using tools, libraries, and avoiding some of the more dark corners of the language and standard library. And if you have a large legacy code base, adopting some of these practices is prudent.

However, a lot of this stuff boils down to discipline and skill. You need to know what to use and do, and why. And then you need to be disciplined enough to stick with that. And hope that everybody around you is equally skilled and disciplined.

However, for new projects, there usually are valid alternatives. Even performance and memory are not the arguments they used to be. Rust seems to be building a decent reputation for combining compile time safety with performance and robustness; often beating C/C++ implementations of things where Rust is used to provide a drop in replacement. Given that, I can see why major companies are reluctant to take on new C/C++ projects. I don't think there are many (or any) upsides to the well documented downsides.

> C++ and C rely, heavily, on skill and discipline instead of automated checks to stay safe.

You can't sensibly talk about C and C++ as a single language. One is the most simple language there is, most of the rules to which can be held in the head of a single person while reading code.

The other is one of the most complex programming languages to ever have existed, in which even world-renowned experts in lose their facility for the language after a short break from it.

Have you written significant amounts of C or C++?

Most people don't write C, nor use the C compiler, even when writing C. You use C++ and the C++ compiler. For (nearly) all intents and purposes, C++ has subsumed and replaced C. Most of the time when someone says something is "written in C" it actually means it's C++ without the +± features. It's still C++ on the C++ compiler.

Actual uses of actual C are pretty esoteric and rare in the modern era. Everything else is varying degrees of C++.

Sending out a strong disagree from the embedded systems world. C is king here.

(Broad, general, YMMV statement): The general C++ arc for an embedded developer looks like this:

1.) discover exceptions are way too expensive in embedded. So is RTTI.

2.) So you turn them off and get a gimped set of C++ with no STL.

3.) Then you just go back to C.

Skype was written without exception handling and RTTI, although using a lot of C++ features. You can write good C++ code without these dependencies. You don't use STL but with cautious use of hand-built classes you go far.

Today I wouldn't recommnend Skype built in any language except Rust. But the Skype founders Ahti Heinla, Jaan Tallinn and Priit Kasesalu found exactly the right balance of C and C++ for the time.

I also wrote a few lines of code in that dialect of C++ (no exceptions). And it didn't feel much different from modern C++ (exception are really fatal errors)

And regarding to embedded, the same codebase was embedded in literally all the ubiquitous TVs of the time, even DECT phones. I bet there are only a few (if any) application codebases of significant size to have been deployed at that scale.