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Comment by llukas | Hacker News Reader

> C++, on the other hand, is only really an effective language in the hands of people who have either fully internalized the 1,000 page specification, or wasted a depressing number of synaptic connections on memorizing minute trivia about what constructs to use under what circumstances.

No. You use profiling tools and optimize hotspots. Pareto principle applies here so you look at 20% of program tops.

Rest is irrelevant and can be executed as inefficiently as you please as long as you got your big O complexity right.

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Or the language and compiler can just save you the trouble and get it right from the beginning.

What you see as trouble other people see as desired behavior.

Pick the right language.

Isn't C++ still pretty much the fastest language out there, except Fortran for some numerical applications? I thought that's the main reason to use it over Python/Java/etc.

C. Use C.

Having recently done some C development after a few years of exclusively C++, no, no thank you.

I'll take my RAII and destructors, thank you very much.

Hence why already back in 1993, when faced with the option of Turbo C 2.0 vs Turbo C++ 1.0, I could not understand why bother with C at all, still don't.

Those language creators and their names, "C","C++", "Objective-C","HolyC", "C#". I almost thought "C." was a new language.

C doesn't have destructors or move semantics.

Who said anything about Python or Java? In any case Java and C++ are roughly similar. The next tier of languages such as Rust or Haskell are within a small constant factor in the usual benchmarks. But quoting such benchmarks is questionable because the C and C++ implementations require much more man-hours of hyper optimization to get into that top-tier position. The real important takeaway is that the first or second attempt in C++, by someone who is not a language lawyer, is nowhere near the maximum achievable speed. Whereas the first or second attempt by a similar layman in a reasonable language like Haskell is not only faster than the initial C++ version, but has fewer bugs as well.

> Who said anything about Python or Java? In any case Java and C++ are roughly similar.

And with Python you use heavily optimized native libraries (Numpy & co.) where it matters.

Speaking as someone who has spent time optimizing programs in both languages, Rust is certainly not in the same tier as Haskell. It should be in the same tier as C or C++. If there's a program where it's not, then we consider it a bug. (And indeed, those exist. :-) But they are fixable!)

C++ and Java are absolutely not similar in terms of performance. Java requires a virtual machine, C++ compiles to binary. Not in the same league.

And in regard to the first draft of a C++ program being slow until you spend lots of time optimizing it, when comparing to say Haskell, that is not at all my experience. I'm generally able to write clean and efficient programs in C++ on the first draft, and they are invariably more performant than if I had written it in a slower language, without a significantly greater amount of effort.

Java doesn't require a VM per se, there are plenty of commercial JDKs that compile straight into native code.

In case you want to state that a VM is like a language runtime in that case, C++ also needs one for handling exceptions, RTTI, global constructors/destructors, floating point emulation,...

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