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.

People innately admire difficult skills, regardless of their usefulness. Acrobatic skateboarding is impressive, even when it would be faster and safer to go in a straight line or use a different mode of transport.

To me skill and effort is misplaced and wasted when it's spent on manually checking invariants that a compiler could check better automatically, or implementing clever workarounds for language warts that no longer provide any value.

Removal of busywork and pointless obstacles won't make smart programmers dumb and lazy. It allows smart programmers to use their brainpower on bigger more ambitious problems.

These type comments always remind me that we forget where we come from in terms of computation, every time.

It's important to remember Rust's borrow checker was computationally infeasible 15 years ago. C & C++ are much older than that, and they come from an era where variable name length affected compilation time.

It's easy to publicly shame people who do hard things for a long time in the light of newer tools. However, many people who likes these languages are using them longer than the languages we champion today were mere ideas.

I personally like Go in these days for its stupid simplicity, but when I'm going to do something serious, I'll always use C++. You can fight me, but never pry C++ from my cold, dead hands.

For note, I don't like C & C++ because they are hard. I like them because they provide a more transparent window the processor, which is a glorified, hardware implemented PDP-11 emulator.

Last, we shall not forget that all processors are C VMs, anyway.