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Comment by marcosdumay | Hacker News Reader

Well, I find that when my C++ compiles <segmentation fault>

When I first learned Java, still in my undergrad, my first impression (and nearly everybody's) was that when it compiles it works. It was still more work than Perl, Lisp, Prolog, and everything, but didn't require the annoying C debugging cycle.

But, anyway, all that is kids play near Haskell.

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Hello! I don't know if English is your first language or not, but that last sentence was significantly confusing that I wanted to correct it for you and others who may read it.

The two idioms are 'child's play' & 'next to'. The words are correct synonyms but the usage is unusual enough that I read as having a totally different meaning my first time.

I was also confused by it. However I read the last sentence as the author making a meta-point by using purposefully incorrect grammar, a sort of reversal of the first sentence about c++ code compiling but leading to segfault--like an artistic statement. If it was an accident, then all the better!

English is not my first language, and it is a rare construct. I thought it was correct.

Out of curiosity, how should it read?

I believe the common form is "X is child's play (next to|compared to) Y".

Don't worry too much, I always enjoy little gotcha's like this. It's like your brain has to think twice to understand the meaning, but in the end it does. It's really fun and colourful to read half modified phrases and that's how language evolves.

>didn't require the annoying C debugging cycle

Are we talking C or C++ ? C compiler is basically useless for compile time error checking because C type system is ridiculously weak. C++ on the other hand can buy you a lot of things with templates, richer type semantics, etc.

And also keep in mind that C++11 and onward is very different from C++ of yore and it catches a lot of errors at the compile time - move semantics and RAII really buy you a lot - the downside is that it's opt-in so the compiler won't force you - and it's less strict than say Rust, but it still gets you there 90% of the way.

Both languages have approximately the same problems for debugging. Explicit memory references are hard to follow, lack of overflowing protection requires a lot of extra caution to catch the errors, and failures lead to an unforgiving stop with at most a core dump. C++ is much better for statically catching errors, but templates and copy/move semantics make it even harder to debug.

And yes, I imagine C++11 is much better. Unfortunately, I didn't write anything big in C++ since then.

You avoid explicit references in C++11 and use STL containers which check for overflow.

I agree that C++ can have the same issues but the frequency is not comparable because you don't drop to those unsafe parts if you don't have to.

So with C++14 I get that "if it compiles it runs" feeling comparable to say C#.

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