Hacker News Reader

Comment by gonzo41 | Hacker News Reader

c++. Its not going away.

C and C++ have both passed the threshold of immortality. There's so many billions of lines of code in both those languages that the likelihood of either of them ever disappearing is very slim.

The question is about new development, and to what extent C and C++ are evolutionary dead ends. Nobody would design a language like C today, would they? They'd be laughed at.

This is one advantage D has - it provides a path for gradual migration. It integrates so well with C and C++ that you don't need to throw away all th eold code and start again, you can do new devlopment on your existing project in D without too much pain.

They'd only be laughed at because they were accidentally recreating C and it'd be easier to just use C. C itself is a great language doing the job it was made for very well.

Again, the evidence of this is rather slim. It's basically impossible to create safe, code in C as evidenced by the fact that nobody has every managed it.

You're making the mistake of assuming that because you know something really well, that makes it good.

NASA got 3.8 million lines of safety critical code written in C for the Mars Curiosity rover by 40 engineers in 5 years. It can be done.

The talk on their coding standards, automatic code checking, code review and code coverage is well worth watching and listening to.

http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2014/2/171689-mars-code/abstra...

But C wasn't made for safe code, it was made as a replacement for assembly language to implement Unix in. And that it arguably did well ;-)

Incidentally, according to Wikipedia, development of C started in 1972, the same year buffer overflows as a concept were first documented.

Use the right tool for the job, given the circumstances. Sometimes, the trade-off of switching away from C is reasonable and C is the wrong tool for the job. Sometimes, there is literally no reasonable option other than C. Sometimes, it's a finer balance and one needs to apply thought and knowledge and experience.

Use the right tool for the job, given the circumstances.

I know I said the same thing repeatedly, but around here when claiming that C is sometimes the right tool, you have to state "Use the right tool for the job, given the circumstances" more than once, and there will still be people saying that there is no use for C ever ever ever and everyone should use {fetish language du jour}.

I think the mistake you made was seeing your own concerns (safety) and assuming that because your needs require you to use something other than C, nobody should use C. I see this a lot in the programming world; people forget that they work in a tiny tiny tiny corner of the industry and assume their experience applies everywhere.

The level of verbosity in modern C++ is almost approaching Java levels these days. I could see a simpler language gain favour.

The beauty of C++ is that you can define an arbitrarily small subset of the standard that work as simpler language of its own!

Too bad not two projects can agree which subset.

Sounds like someone needs to rigorously define a good subset then write a tool to verify that a program uses only that subset.

As if by magic....

https://isocpp.org/blog/2015/09/bjarne-stroustrup-announces-...

Wow, that's huge. It's what everybody's doing anyway, but being standardized with big names and heavy hitters behind it makes it much easier to advocate and argue for.

Such an effort would be so much easier to advocate for in a C++ shop, and more importantly, very difficult to argue against.

This deserves a proper HN discussion. I've resubmitted it, it missed the front page the first time around:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10545921

(sorry for the karma stealing, lucozade totally deserves the karma if my resubmission takes off)

I suspect it'll end like this: http://xkcd.com/927/

Isn't the verbosity all about job security? ;)

http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/I_did_it_for_you_all

This hasn't been true since C++11.

C++11 is as terse as ML.

The trick is to not use all the features.

It's actually the lack of features that's the problem for verbosity in C++. Features like algebraic types, pattern matching, Unicode handling – which are all part of modern languages – require bloated libraries and templating upon templating to work in C++.

C++'s apparent excess of features is mostly due to the fact that its memory model and type system have hundreds of edge cases that need handling. Compared to D, Rust and other newer languages, C++ never actually feels full featured (despite being horribly complex in some areas).

You got it wrong.

Before J2EE was a thing, there were something called CORBA and COM and mainly used from C++.

C++ has reached the state of Cobol.

It's not going away just for historical reasons. There is too much code written in it which needs to be maintained in the next decades. I don't envy them who are forced to do that :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com