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Comment by richard_todd | Hacker News Reader

That's because C started as a language rather than a platform. You have always needed to marry it to POSIX or Win32 or whatever to do anything useful. Now with various proposals like 2D graphics, C++11 threads etc. it looks like they are moving in the portable platform direction.

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Yes, I know. We had this "C runs on systems that don't even have disk" excuse for so long it's became a cultural thing.

I'm not sure where to draw the distinction between a language and a platform and I don't think I care. Those additions will make C++ way more useful, libraries will become more composable, binaries smaller, and life will be easier for 99.9% of people who use C++. So, I'm glad they finally dropped the lowest common denominator approach - we've been making our own batteries for way too long.

I think it's more of a philosophy than an excuse. I'd say it's only in the Java era that people have started expecting their language to have "batteries included." Big ships like C/C++ turn slowly, but it does seem to be turning that direction. Whether that's better than the community defaulting to boost libs, I don't know.

You're right about changing expectations, but it is better. Really. Too many people view boost as a giant cumbersome blob of libraries interconnected in unintuitive ways and refuse to use it, especially if they only need something that they perceive as small and simple.

We've been through the same exact arguments years ago, only then it was about things like std::string. Oh, no, it allocates dynamic memory behind the scenes - there are systems that don't even have heap! As a relic from that era some popular libraries still use their own string classes.

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