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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

Every time C++ is discussed here, I feel like I might be the only person on the planet that likes C++ and enjoys working in it. I get excited when Sutter publishes an article about some proposed new feature. I enjoy talking about code with new hires and giving them a set of Scott Meyers' books to read. I'm in awe of what the clever Boost contributors wring out of the language.

I don't think it's a stinking ball of meat. It's a living language with a deep history that's getting better all the time. It's a wonderful tool that I use daily.

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Let's be friends! I did a lot of C++ back in the late 90s/early 2000s, and it kind of sat on the shelf for me for a while. I've recently come back and am discovering all of the joys of modern C++(11/14). I'm really really impressed. The first project was a cross-platform library on top of libusb. With all of the great concurrency things built-in now (std::thread/mutex/lock, etc), I managed to write the whole library without a single #ifdef! Generates Linux .so, OS X .dylib, and Windows DLLs. Amazing!

>I managed to write the whole library without a single #ifdef! Generates Linux .so, OS X .dylib, and Windows DLLs. Amazing!

Could you expand on how you are doing this? You're still using a Makefile or a similar tool with some kind of platform detection for the build itself, right?

Not sure whether the parent does it like this, but you can use cmake to describe the build, and then (for instance) run cmake --build to build the project in a 'cross-platform' way using the platform's native compiler toolchain, it works the same on Windows, OSX and Linux. I think what the parent meant with 'no #ifdefs' is that the C++11 std lib comes with more modules that make a lot of platform-specific code-paths unnecessary (for instance std::thread, std::atomic for threading, and std::chrono for high-resolution time-measuring).

Yup, you nailed it. cmake for handling the builds, and the C++11 stdlib covers every platform-specific thing I needed. The only platform-specific thing I needed to do was point the CMakeLists.txt at the correct libusb (libusb.so, libusb.dylib, libusb.dll). Absolutely beautiful.

Edit: to elaborate a little more about cmake... You can use cmake to generate both Makefiles and Visual Studio build files.

On Windows:

mkdir build; cd build; cmake .. -G "Visual Studio 12 2013"; cmake --build .

On OS X or Linux:

mkdir build; cd build; cmake ..; make

As the old saying goes: "There are languages that everybody complains about, and there are languages that nobody uses" ;)

You are not alone.

It is my favourite language for large scale and high performance projects.

I like it too and I'm happy to be using C++11 for software development.

It's mature, standardized, cross-platform and has a good tool & library ecosystem. When it comes to shipping something, I'll take C++ any day over the language that just turned 1.0 or the other one which doesn't have a debugger and can barely optimize. I guess there are those non-sexy languages you use to get stuff done and the ones you blog about.

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