Ways to Get Better at C++
fluentcpp.com
fluentcpp.com
Just replace that Josuttis's C++ standard library with C++11 version and throw in Mayers new effective book for good measure and you're all set
And I'm completely serious. I've earned my living with C++ for over a decade, am considered a valuable contributor and still... so clueless towards so many details.
If after a decade there are so many details still obscured from you, then that's pretty much again a fault of the overly-engineered and tacked on language called C++.
Other mainstream language work fine and allow you to still write clean and modern code without having literally dozens of subsets and implementations. So why is it that C++ feels the need to have so many?
Using my favorite scripting language (Python) as an example, I always need to check which version is installed on a given OS and then validate at https://docs.python.org/ if all the features I want are actually available on that version.
Not to mention CPython, PyPy, Cython, JPython differences on top of that.
There really is no other language that fits all of the constraints C++ fits. If there was, I'd be using it. And before you ask 'Have you looked into...' the answer is yes, unless the language is obscure, in which case it lacks the ecological robustness of C++.
jblow, I know you read HN, lots of us are looking forward to Jai.
There are some things I disagree on with it, but most of those are orthogonal to the domain of which the language was meant to be applied, namely game programming. For that end, I can get behind those.
That said - the main things I don't like are the lack of exception handling, and no automatic memory management. I understand for game programming why these aren't going to be a part of the language. At the same time, I fear that without these, it may relegate the language to something of a niche language only used for game development and nothing else. While it is laudable to think that these features aren't needed, there is a reason they became available - and it mainly has to do with the fact that even "good programmers" aren't "perfect programmers"; we are all humans, not machines.
Features that make the language stand out, though, are the ideas of functions that run at compile time, which allow for a build system that is written in Jai and builds on compile (so you don't need to learn some other "language" just for building your world), the whole AOS/SOA mess that is made simple to implement with only one keyword (kinda neat!), plus the whole "uplift" of code from inner to global usage, with minimal changes, as it morphs from "lines of code" to "capture" to "anonymous function", etc - that's pretty powerful.
The inverted typed declaration syntax for variables and functions will take some getting used to, but that part is very minor. There's one part on this that I question - namely that variables are declared like:
name: type = value
...so:
foo: int = 0;
...but functions are defined as:
name := () -> return_type {}
ie:
bar := () -> float {}
I would have thought that a function would be defined as:
name: return_type = () {}
so:
baz: float = () {}
...thus more like the variable declarations (plus it would allow for turning a variable into a function easier, perhaps). There is probably something about compiler design, parsing, etc that I don't know that pre-empted things? That would be my first guess as to why this difference exists, but I would love to hear the actual reason from the author, if he reads this.
Pretty sure Jai is already powerful enough that you could add this dynamically to any program.
With the name := () -> return_type {} syntax, you know whether it's a variable declaration or function declaration after two tokens: name (for either), then colon or colon-equal to differentiate the two.
Go, Rust, Swift, Ada, Pascal - languages both modern and old also use that inverted syntax and it's not such a burden to get used to.
> I don't like are the lack of exception handling
If done properly, it's possible to do without exceptions and have more robust and readable code - see for example Rust with its Error type and the try macro/? operator, which I've found I much prefer to exceptions.
After using boost in several projects and regretting it each time (slow compile times, painful to configure), I finally learned my lesson and "don't use boost" is now one of my guiding principles when programming in C++.
That said, I'm not sure how you wish to engage people here with that comment. Do you have any specific criticisms of C++ (there are many!) that we can discuss beyond your personal feelings?
If you need interop between two languages you almost always have to drop to C, if you want to do that while keeping high level concepts like object, then use C++.
If you need more performance and you have already maxed out perf in some "higher" language. Then a naive C++ rewrite is often just faster. Then when you start breaking out C++ profiling tools and carefully managing memory you get insane speeds that didn't seem possible before.
With some of new stuff in C++11/14/17 it is actually fun to work in C++, not as fun as Ruby... up until 3d things start appearing on the screen.
Okay, but I didn't say that? I said C++ has limited uses, _unless_ you're near the hardware, where its much more common. You can disagree, but its better if you disagree with what I actually said :P
But to your reply, Personally, I don't agree that C++ is fun to work with. Like any other language, I tolerate it as and when I need to. And like I said in the previous reply, sometimes C++ is the only choice, and you accept that and do the best you can. I've found that good tooling does reduce some of the headaches, especially when it comes to debugging (although stepping through optimized production code still remains a giant pain in the ass). I'm happy that the language is progressing and with all of the new features, its like a cafeteria where you chose what you like and what works for you and your team. I certainly don't agree with all the advice that the C++ cheerleaders put out on the internet about inserting every new feature into production code. Personally I take a very conservative approach and only use features that have shown tobe useful across the entire dev cycle of - helping to conceptualize an idea, being easy to reason about by everyone on the team, being easy to debug, and being reliable enough for 24/7 execution (though this applies more to the library side of things). My code runs automation machinery, and it has to have zero bugs in it. I choose C++ because currently its the best tool for the job.
In pretty much every type of application domain there are a large number of C++ applications. It is used in finance, business, games, medical, as you point out it is used very close to the hardware particularly when that hardware is custom and image the web with many fewer browsers and servers. The only kind of developer that might outnumber C++ devs is Java devs because there are so many custom internal enterprise applications that place higher emphasis on being barely functional than performant (and they are largely correct in their decision).
I find no need for your needlessly specific separation of limited vs whatever my wording used. I hope that whatever your take from this, should you choose to continuing nitpick, is that C++ is hugely useful in many places it just is new and glamorous so it doesn't get much press.
I soon removed it afterwards after knowing what "knowing c++" implied.
That pretty much applies to any subject. Some bachelor's degrees take longer than that, and no one becomes an expert with a bachelor's or even a master's degree.
It's easily one of the most complex mainstream languages and one with the most pitfalls which is why higher level languages are preferable when feasible.
I'm not kidding.
I've got several linear feet of C++ books on my bookshelf, have read most of those books, and I consider myself an average C++ programmer, not a language guru by any means.
I also wouldn't bother with Effective STL or More Effective C++. They're ancillary to the main books of that series and are somewhat outdated.
I don't know if you know the meaning of "proficiency", but if you are trying to argue that it takes work to become an expert in a subject then it seems you aren't aware of what being an expert actually entails.
Moreover, Those books appear to be a lot mainlyl because the subjects covered by half of them actually overlap.
Jonathan Blow's upcoming language?
In C++, structs are just classes whose members are public by default.
I might be extremely biased about this, but I can't not recommend to follow Folly as well (https://github.com/facebook/folly). There is some very good C++ there (and some bad C++ too), and it is generally more readable than Boost. Some ex-Boost people work on it too.
The implementation of Function (https://github.com/facebook/folly/blob/master/folly/Function...), for example, is mindblowing. I learned lots of tricks from it that I ended up using in a bunch of places.
There's also a lot of interesting things happening in concurrent data structures under experimental/ (and the widely used MPMCQueue and LifoSem are also excellent).
I studied C and C++ back in university (I was in the wave of students that came through after they switched from Pascal as the teaching language, and before they switched to Java). And my first job or two back in the early-2000's was using C++ in HP-UX servers, to talk to other systems via CORBA.
But that was ages ago, and once I stumbled into a Java job I never left. Every so often decide to scrape off the rust and check out C++ again, but the ENVIRONMENT setup scares me off.
Should you use GCC or LLVM? If you're on a Windows box, do you try one of those? (there's at least three different distributions of MINGW available) Or do you use Microsoft's compiler? (VS has potential licensing issues, while the freeware build tools are pretty arcane and it's hard to even find an installer or know which exact thing to install) Or Cygwin? (I'm not 100% sure on the current state of its licensing)
I've tried to build the wxWidgets library at least 100 times. It gives you dozens of options for compiler and environmental setup, and yet I've never found a choice that successfully built all the sample apps.
Once you have a compiler setup, what about an IDE? (Don't even start with the "just use Vim or Emacs" crap, I'm not an animal!) I love IntelliJ in the Java world, but don't want to pay for JetBrains CLion just for hobby/personal use. The last time I tried Eclipse's C++ support it felt pretty half-baked. Qt Creator is actually really nice IDE (a C++ IDE should be written in C++!), but it feels very specific to writing Qt apps.
What about build tools? It's hard enough for Java newbies to wrap their heads around Maven or Gradle. But makefiles and "configure" scripts are far more arcane, and which flavor of make should you be using in 2017? It's hard enough to build a project that uses one of these large frameworks with opinionated build systems. I wouldn't even know where to begin in combining two opinionated build systems as dependencies of a single project, or creating a new build system from scratch for a greenfield large project.
Once you have a compiler, IDE, and build system and are ready to start coding, what about a standard library? Is Boost still the thing everyone uses? STL? Something else?
I really can't imagine that learning C++ syntax is THAT challenging in comparison to Java/C#, Rust, D, or anything else. But I'd love to see an "Effective C++ Environment" book.
No, I just use Visual Studio.
If you don't want to pay for it, there is the Visual Studio Community edition available for free for personal use, which is basically Visual Studio Professional re-branded with a different license.
Don't do this to yourself, just stick with regular Visual Studio and its build system. Nowadays you can even use it to build Linux binaries, so why put yourself through the hassle of using stone age text files to configure your build when Microsoft has been providing a perfectly usable solution for almost two decades?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/31/microsoft_visual_st...
> Text files aren't "stone age"
The issue is whether your build system provides you with an UI that enables you to be productive (e.g. Visual Studio), or if it forces you to manually edit some configuration files using some arbitrary syntax that doesn't seem to display any sort of internal logic (e.g. CMake). In this respect, being forced to deal with text files is stone age, just like debugging a C++ program with stock GDB.
In the end, it's a matter of preference. Do you want an IDE so that you can focus on programming, or do you want to set up and maintain a string of loosely coupled tools that, when the stars align, do what you want to.. kind of.
I lived the pain of hunting for binary downloads that match my exact Visual Studio version. Even if you were lucky enough to not need to compile from source, you'd still need to manually configure each library and include path for both debug and release mode separately. And, when you later move the project onto a new computer or share it with a friend, you're likely to discover that hidden somewhere in that mess is a path that's no longer valid.
By comparison, adding a library on Linux is usually trivial. Call 'apt install foo', call 'FindFoo' in your CMakeLists.txt, and use the variables FindFoo provides. Done.
The Visual Studio debugger, Intellisense and plugin integration are great, but project configuration is atrocious and nobody should be emulating Microsoft's approach on that.
My life got so much when I just worked in Linux, then used CMake to hide all the visual studio grossness. My software all still builds over there and my unit tests still pass, but I get an environment that works and is understandable. I started with visual studio too, I never understood what the hell it was doing or why, there was always one more corner case or one more confusing exception to a rule or one more thing that wasn't standard C++ but msvc wanted.
I think windows and visual studio was designed to be impossible to understand intentionally, and this gets confirmed every time I ask some MCSE or or other cert holder "why" or "how" to some specific feature. I am fine with them not knowing, but they don't even know how to look it up of use technical tools to inspect it. With any other OS it is pretty easy to follow technical stuff all the way down to the bare metal and back up if that is what solving a problem takes and you can do this through the documentation or through the inspection tools like debuggers profilers. I have tried with MSVC on windows and get blocked the first time some "feature" I have never heard of and didn't ask for gets in the way. Now that understand some of what the older versions are doing I still don't understand why they do it, there is no clear technical reason to do much of the non-sense they do.
One last gripe, why does the installed thing fill like 20GB and take an hour to install when QtCreator, gcc and clang takes 3GB with all their dependencies and like 2 minutes to install from apt-get?
> it always tried to compile my stuff as C++/CLI, force linking against libraries that weren't needed
I'm pretty sure you can change these things in the project settings.
> just didn't have the core language features I needed
Each new version of Visual Studio usually includes new core language features, just like gcc or clang or whatever.
> Is there a simple flag to statically link the stdlib yet
Yes, I think it's been there for a very long time (just switch the runtime library to "/MT" if I'm not mistaken).
> Did they get rid of the crazy errors in the std lib when building with /w4 yet?
I don't think remember anything out of the ordinary when using /W4; when using /Wall you do get indeed lots of warnings, but that's because it activates some sort of static analysis that is most of the time overkill.
> My life got so much when I just worked in Linux, then used CMake to hide all the visual studio grossness.
Funny, for me it was exactly the opposite. For every checkbox and textfield Visual Studio provides as a simple option and/or toggle, there's an equivalent horrible CMake configuration line (or, more common, set of lines in multiple CMake files). Because when I'm busy plowing through a huge C++ codebase, all I need is worry about the syntax and state of my CMake scripts.
> With any other OS it is pretty easy to follow technical stuff all the way down to the bare metal and back up if that is what solving a problem takes and you can do this through the documentation or through the inspection tools like debuggers profilers.
Easy to say, except that in practice, when you're on a deadline, all that source code becomes most of the time a liability. When you're trying to understand why this CMake script doesn't do exactly what you want it to do, are you actually going to start debugging it? It's probably a better option than reading its very poor documentation, but still.
> One last gripe, why does the installed thing fill like 20GB and take an hour to install when QtCreator, gcc and clang takes 3GB with all their dependencies and like 2 minutes to install from apt-get?
I think you can customize your installation to take less than 20 GB. I don't know why the big size compared to other compilers/environments, but to be honest it's not really a big issue for me. When looking at the bigger picture, I waste an extra 5 minutes installing the environment but I win a huge amount of time by not having to be bothered with the build system, compiler options and other minutiae (unless I explicitly want to).
If you have a specific use case that makes it difficult for you to use Visual Studio I sympathize, but overall, having used gcc/qt creator/eclipse/whatever, Visual Studio is a one-size-fits-all solution that made my life easier than the alternatives.
If he start with either you or my professional choice in IDEs he will have a ton of neat details to explore that will do him no good but can easily break his setup.
Eventually he will want an editor that can launch a command to do his build for him and he will learn the how and whys of IDEs. As his project gets bigger he will start a shell script or batch file and intuit why build systems exist.
He will learn the kinds of problems that come from software and not be bogged down by a bunch often useless details in professional tools until he needs those details. By the time that happens those details can't help but be useful.
> I'm pretty sure you can change these things in the project settings.
Those things could be changed, in the current versions it is easy, but in the version from from around 2012-2014 it was a huge and it would automatically be changed back if you selected certain items from the menu. Not all project have the luxury of being able to be up to date. Particularity in shops that have bought all-in to the microsoft philosophy, where tools cost an inordinate amount of money for no reason I and suss out.
> Each new version of Visual Studio usually includes new core language features
And they are slower to get the features if they ever get them, unless they lead development I am sure it A+ module and co-routine support but msvc 2015 rev 3 didn't have thread_local and every other compiler did. This is the kind of you can replace with a macro I had to rewrite an algorithm to make work it on that compiler.
If I want to ship a source library and want people to be able to build it on msvc, I pretty much don't get to use thread_local even though it enables a bunch of really cool things. This is just my most recent pain. I have written many things that worked great on the 3 PC platforms as long you weren't using msvc, but as soon as you switch from mingw to msvc something ridiculous broke. Whether it be the preposterous macros set in windows.h or the completely unique semantics for their very bad pre-compiled header implementation I have to deal with a break on just windows/msvc about every two months. Good luck dealing with std::uncaught_exception or any other feature that super useful in niche circumstances.
> Yes, I think it's been there for a very long time (just switch the runtime library to "/MT" if I'm not mistaken).
Except it doesn't enable static linking, like you said it switches which library you build against and some things are still dynamically linked. This non-sense is also all bound up with debugging and thread support. Every other compiler lets you choose these option independently but with msvc you have to choose one of 4 /MX flags and hope its good enough.
On /W4 and /Wall I am cool with all manner of errors being found in my code. I expect that and even some spurious ones. What I don't like is the huge amount of non-virtual deconstructor noise coming from the std library or other warnings from headers that the compiler controls. Those should either be fixed or exempted from warning generation. I have never gotten a warning from Gcc or Clangs std library, I don't know how they do it, I don't need to, but with a sufficiently high warning level and all warnings as errors I need to wrap certain includes like <vector> in pragmas to disable warnings. I now understand why some windows devs think coercing all warnings to errors is a bad idea that can only hurt productivity, because with their tool-set it is.
> Funny, for me it was exactly the opposite
Then, I suspect your builds are simple. As soon as a project needs to do things like support multiple platforms or multiple compilers or even needed to generate code as part of build the menus become pretty limiting. You can run arbitrary build steps using the menus in visual studio, but it is a pain. If you want to use SWIG to generate bindings or configure Doxygen to generate API docs and get the errors from it in your IDE the difficulty level gets super high.
That might not affect a fresh minted developer still learning, but the other side of the massive menus is that if you don't know what those options are or do finding the option that changes some behavior involves a huge amount of googling. That itself isn't bad if it can be avoided, but inevitably all that googling gets you to the msdn or technet, the two worst piles of shit for documentation and answers on the internet. And every one links to them. They are often stale, contradictory, light on detail or just plain wrong.
This never happens with CMakes docs (sometimes they are light on detail but then there is stack overflow) their docs are versioned, skill with one version moves with you to the next version and it is the de facto standard for projects not mired in vendor lock-in so there are countless examples of CMake project to learn from. Plus it is a full blown programming language so if you need to do something unfortunately interesting in your build you just do it, wrap it in a function to hide, document it and move on.
This is turning into a msvc vs cmake showdown. This is apples and oranges and needless I won't participate further other than to say the community has spoken and CMake is the build system of choice and visual studio is the IDE to use on windows.
> I think you can customize your installation to take less than 20 GB.
You can; I was almost going to say I was speaking in hyperbole, but no I meant 20GB. I have seen isntalls in excess of 45GB... Who the hell needs 45GB of IDE and compiler.
The problem with trying to get smaller installs is that the menu options in the installer are undocumented or poorly documented to the point that someone who has painstaking researched it needs to give you a list of boxes to check for your project or you include a bunch of needless BS.
Even if msvc were a pleasure to use I probably wouldn't at this point. Too many times microsoft has tried to screw me. They are just a horrible company and treat people poorly. Sticking in the space of compilers and IDEs they made too many technical decision for marketing and vendor lock-in reasons for me to trust them again. Their tools sucking just make it easier for me to avoid them, if they released stuff with the quality of Jetbrains or Qt I would have a harder time resisting.
It seems you were overly polite, so you may have misread my post. I am not angry with you as you have been quite cordial and earnest, but please reread my post with your internal voice screaming and deeply enraged as though you just saw an orphan, a puppy and a baby seal all run over by a lawyer driving a hummer that is "rolling coal" fueled only by endangered redwood chips who works for patent trolls and is on his way to defend a giant oil company's right to defraud the founders of a tiny tech startup in a totally skeezy but technically legal way. If your politics don't lean that way, then you will need to settle for the phrase "Please, reread that in an extremely angry voice". These tools that microsoft makes have caused me many years of pain and will continue to do so even though I heavily invested in open source, and I have wished many times for a button I could push to make them all disappear.
EDIT - Have an upvote for remaining so polite and attempting to help me fix my problems, even thought we are well past that.
The problem at my current job involves a metric crapton of CMake files that don't have a clear maintainer (big company, anyone forced to touch those files just does the minimum required to get the desired effect) and it's a general hassle to understand what exactly the project settings will be for any given directory. I find the CMake syntax so confusing that I switched to Meson as build system for my personal projects; it's not ideal, but I find it easier to digest.
Anyway, I understand your point of view. Have a nice weekend.
That's what I'm talking about. VS works great out of the box using the Wizard, but the learning curve gets real steep right after that.
I'm not really following. Just add the other library's project to the solution?
> or autoincrementing the version in the resource file
There are probably multiple solutions, but off the top of my head you can add pre/post build steps to a project, so you can invoke a script that will autoincrement the version for you.
> Or when you import and very old VC++ project and the auto conversion process only sort-of fixes things?
I agree, this sometimes causes problems. When that happens, creating a new project from the existing source code can be better than trying to fix the imported project.
> VS works great out of the box using the Wizard, but the learning curve gets real steep right after that.
As far as IDEs go, I feel VS is tolerable. I agree there is a learning curve once you start customizing your project, but in my opinion it's not as steep as it is in Eclipse, for example.
GCC still compiles faster and produces faster binaries for me. But I like to swap to clang once in a while since it has better compiler messages (always use -Wall -Wextra).
> If you're on a Windows box, do you try one of those? (there's at least three different distributions of MINGW available) Or do you use Microsoft's compiler? (VS has potential licensing issues, while the freeware build tools are pretty arcane and it's hard to even find an installer or know which exact thing to install) Or Cygwin? (I'm not 100% sure on the current state of its licensing)
Instead of Cygwin you should check out MSYS2: http://www.msys2.org/ It has a package manager which can install both GCC and LLVM.
> I've tried to build the wxWidgets library at least 100 times. It gives you dozens of options for compiler and environmental setup, and yet I've never found a choice that successfully built all the sample apps.
Check out this wxWidgets project of mine: https://github.com/jhasse/pwcalculator It should build on all operation systems, if not please create an issue and I will take a look :)
> Once you have a compiler setup, what about an IDE?
I'm using Visual Studio Code with the C++ extension (on both Linux and Windows).
> What about build tools?
I'm using Waf (and SCons for older projects), mostly because I also like Python. In my experience you should avoid qmake, most others are fine.
> Once you have a compiler, IDE, and build system and are ready to start coding, what about a standard library? Is Boost still the thing everyone uses? STL?
Yes, both are pretty popular. Nowadays the STL covers most of the older Boost stuff (e.g. shared_ptr, thread, regex, ...).
Resist the temptation to switch tools a lot, or tweak things continually with plugins or code generators or whatever. I've seen people do this; they get distracted by tooling and tend to learn more slowly.
All you really need to do is sit your butt in a chair in front of a good C++ compiler/debugger, and stock VS without any tweaks fits that perfectly.
On the other hand, the Whole Tomato refactoring tools are pretty awesome, and most of my cow-orkers have them installed. They make large projects a lot easier to deal with (near instantaneous search across a large project is a wonderful thing). But you don't need them, especially when you're starting out.
My basic principle is, when learning a language, doing stuff that isn't involved in learning that language is, well, not learning the language. It's like the aspiring writer who just needs to find the right laptop, the right software, the right printer / coffeeshop / corner of the house . . . it's all excuses and procrastination, just sit down and write.
I recommend starting a blank C++ console project and adding files as you go, otherwise you risk getting confused (e.g. "what the hell is stdafx.h and why is it included by default in my main file") and trapped by Microsoft's ecosystem.
> What about build tools? It's hard enough for Java newbies to wrap their heads around Maven or Gradle.
You don't have to worry, Visual Studio has everything integrated. There is a build system (MSBuild? last time I checked) that you could theoretically use outside of Visual Studio, but you probably don't even need to be aware of its existance.
Also, if you do Android development, Visual Studio abstracts Gradle away, which is basically the way development is supposed to be done.
No it is not, I use QtCreator 99% of times with CMake projects. QtCreator with ClangCodeModel is the best you can get. Nothing even comes close to this combination.
I have to say I am obsessed with IDE's, and I have tried all of IDE's you mentioned, nothing can even come close to QtCreator.
The only drawback is when you use ClangCodeModel in Windows. It seems there is problem of Clang Parser in windows (there was a serious discussion with Clang developers on their mailing list). Parsing and Autocompletion are slow in Windows platform. But it is completely fine in *nix, OS X.
Given your post, I'm assuming Windows.
There's BloodShed Dev-C++ which has Mingw-GCC bundled but you can use another. [1]
Then there's Code::Blocks, which has a Mingw-GCC bundled version - [2]
One IDE that impressed me recently was CodeLite [3]. It doesn't come with a compiler, but its support for GCC is very good, especially gdb. You mention wxWidgets and IIRC it has built-in tools for that as well.
[1] - http://www.bloodshed.net/devcpp.html [2] - http://www.codeblocks.org/ [3] - https://codelite.org/
As for standard libraries, the STL is the standard library and you 'should' use that where possible. Boost is a mix of potential features for C++, a few modules that lots of people rely on (e.g. json, timers, asyncio), and a whole lot of undocumented and unmaintained code. I get by without it most of the time.
Qt Creator is pretty decent even if you don't use Qt. You can use the qmake system which does lock you in somewhat, but it's easier to configure than cmake for a newcomer. You still get debugging/profiling and intelligent autocomplete/linting.
If you don't mind the large library overhead, you can use Qt for a lot of brick-and-mortar code like dealing with filesystems, sockets/serial comms, parsing XML, etc. It's very well documented, updated often and it's GPL which is nice. Or you could statically link it. Personally I've found the Qt GUI framework much more intuitive than the native Windows stdafx stuff.
Don't use gcc or clang on Windows as I have had been bitten by their bugs for a lot times. Always use the native tool on that platform or you will face constant headaches (VS on Win, GCC on Linux and Clang on macOS).
mingw32-make -f makefile.gcc BUILD=release SHARED=1 MONOLITHIC=1 UNICODE=1 USE_OPENGL=1 CXXFLAGS=-fno-keep-inline-dllexport
works on multiple machines for me, I write openGL GUI apps.
https://giantfublog.wordpress.com/2016/10/15/portability-in-...
I'll stick to C++, IDEs and BUILD files.
Before any project, it was Turbo/Borland Pascal and TPU files. No real projects, but it was very easy to use a module, no header files, just "Use Something;" done. C# carried that in there, and Java too.
Then for C++ it was first a simple text files with what to compile, later Makefiles (I still love them), .vcproj, .vcxproj/.sln, scons, cmake, qmake, qbs, custom tailored makefiles, etc. I've never found any of these good, until I used Blaze (Bazel on the outside) at Google (alternatively generate-ninja (gn) for Chromium/Fuchsia, close but not the same).
So what do I like about BUILD files, Bazel and WORKSPACES? It's simply this:
cc_library(
name = "my_lib",
srcs = [ "one.cc", "two.cc" ] # has glob() too
hdrs = [ "one.h", "two.h" ]
deps = [ "//base/something:project" ], # // is like a root for all projects.
)
Bazel (blaze) gets a little bit harder to use if you target different platforms (say ps2, ps3, ps4, xbox, wii, pc, etc.), but there is way to declare that, in this respect GN is much easier, just use "if (is_pc) {}" in the declarations (they are BUILD-like), and you are done.
I just bought the IntelliJ package /yearly, got CLion, also some other things, and started using it for home projects. It comes with bazel support (plugin), so that helps.
--
On the other hand there is QtCreator, Visual Studio (the current free version is almost like professional except CodeLens), then some more experimental ones like the Juce's Projucer, and plenty more.
I could see how mixing templates with other C++ paradigms could quickly get messy in the wrong hands, since it's very powerful.
Otherwise, great article--that's a lot to dive into over a single summer though!
Of course not all hobby projects need to be "practical" or directly useful - but time is a valuable resource and I at least would like to have an actual non-toy project goal in mind when choosing to better grok a language. What is C++ uniquely good for in 2017?
edit :
Useful answers to this question -
* extending libraries for higher level languages
* embedded devI find that when someone's made up their mind about me based on little to no data, there's not much point trying to prove them wrong.
> C++ is one of the most widely used languages for application development
What kind of applications?
"sounds like" is very much the opposite of that.
> What kind of applications?
All of them, except web pages.
This is just factually untrue. Mobile, desktop, data analysis, machine learning and even games : neither are primarily developed with C++ these days.
I imagine you're going to respond with snark about how game engines are written with Cpp, or mention some edge case where a CLR / JVM language needs to call out to native libraries - but there's no escaping the fact it's a niche skill set and one of rapidly diminishing importance to the overwhelming majority of developers.
Android NDK, Objective-C++, ...
> desktop applications
There are plenty of applications written in C++, from legacy code bases like MS Office to almost all content-creation tools ever, most applications whose abbreviations contain "computer aided", many libraries, and boatloads of applications. Like I said, C++ is used practically everywhere.
Most applications developed on Qt are C++ (some Python). Qt itself has already a large user base.
> data analysis
From matlab to gnuplot, oscilloscope and spectrum analyser software, data analysis applications are frequently developed using C++.
> machine learning
On many repositories I can rather clearly see a broad pink bar, e.g. https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=topic%3Amachine-l... https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow
-
If some proprietary application is not obviously written in .NET or Java, C++ is a safe bet.
Those toolkits are only useful for edge cases. SDK performance is adequate for 95% of real world applications.
> From matlab to gnuplot, oscilloscope and spectrum analyser software, data analysis applications are frequently developed using C++.
I.e tools that don't need to be re-implemented, some of which had they been built today could easily have been written with a bytecode / JVM / CLR language.
> On many repositories I can rather clearly see a broad pink bar, e.g. https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=topic%3Amachine-l
In your own link C++ ends up in a distant 6th place. What is that supposed to prove? That it's more popular than JavaScript in ML development?
> https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow
Another tool I'm not re-implementing. You conveniently left out that all of their models are developed with Python - which is what 99.99% of developers interested in ML are trying to do.
Unreal Engine uses C++, Unity's core is C++. DirectX is a C++ API.
Install any game on Steam and you'll see the Visual C++ runtime being installed most of the time.
> Unreal Engine uses C++, Unity's core is C++. DirectX is a C++ API.
I honestly think I addressed this. Most developers aren't trying to extend Unreal or Unity - they're building games with the aforementioned tools.
But you're right that C++ is getting used less and less in games, but I would still say that it's the most used language, especially in AAA games.
It's a little like saying what are some good modern uses for Java? Then you remember that millions of people use Android every day.
I work in computer vision and deal with hardware a lot, both embedded (micros) and 'higher level' (cameras, random optomechanics). You get drivers in C/C++, often dot net, and occasionally other languages. Sometimes you get lucky and someone's written a Python wrapper already, but most of the time it's faster just to use the C++ (otherwise now you have another library to maintain and keep up to date with the vendor - someone else can do that!).
If you work in web development, it's easy to forget that you can't just write a backend in Python and then make it look snazzy with CSS and Javascript. It's one of the few areas where C++ doesn't have much penetration. That said, browsers are written in C++ (Firefox and Chrome, for example) and of course the web servers themselves (plus some C).
The combination of C++ and Python is very powerful. Modern C++ is very easy to read and if you use the STL, you can write surprisingly compact code. I'm also a big fan of Qt for GUI development (plus the other bits you get with it).
Of relevance here, millions (or whatever) of developers need Java every day to build Android applications and all kinds of line-of-business applications all over the world
You can't say the same thing about C++, even if developers build ontop of C++ tools. That is the very point I'm driving towards : not that Cpp isn't an important language or ubiquitous, but that 99% of developers don't have a realistic need for it in 2017.
Yes, it's an important language - but only like 0.1% of developers actually have a good reason to use it.
> If you work in web development
Or mobile development, or game development, or desktop application development - i.e. the vast majority of apps that consumers actually interact with don't require much if any C++ development even if they rely on tools written with C++.
I think most of what you write is based on your imagination about C++ instead of facts and the facts are different. There are millions of C++ developers on our planet.
Read this:
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/zxue/2016/10/24/how-many-de...
And those are only one IDE (Visual Studio) stats.
This is not entirely true anymore for Firefox: it's partially Rust.
Remove C++ from software development and check what is still working...
Remove opcodes & assembler from software development and check what is still working...
See how completely absurd that sounds?
I wouldn't say that C++ is _uniquely_ good for this (C could be used as well as any compiled language that can expose a compatible C ABI which includes Go, Haskell, etc.), but I do feel like the addition of RAII and exceptions matches the Python paradigm quite well.
I don't think that's true. Go only has a FFI to the platform's C ABI (cgo).
https://blog.filippo.io/building-python-modules-with-go-1-5/
As long as you specify the correct interface, Python will happily load your modules.
I'm currently taking Udacity's Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree. Currently I'm on the 2 week "break" between term 2 and 3, which starts on July 6th.
Anyhow, term 1 used Python (and various libraries of course) exclusively. When I signed up, I knew that at some point they were going to use C++ - so I was concerned if my system would need an upgrade (I use Ubuntu 14.04 LTS); but I was assured it would work ok. I was also concerned because I hadn't touched C++ since VS4 (ie - ages ago!) - and I was thinking "will I be able to do this - rusty isn't the word for my skillset in C++".
Term 2 came around, and that's when reality hit - C++ was to be used almost exclusively thru the entire term. Fortunately, Udacity (as part of one of the lessons) gave us a free "preview" of a course they are developing to teach C++ (not sure if it will be free or paid) - and so I went thru that, and found that it was fairly easy! I suppose that my skills in other languages since I had last played with C++ (ie, PHP, Python, Java, Go, Javascript, etc) all worked to make it seem that C++ was "just another syntax". Granted, there are some things which I only barely grok (templates, for instance - but there are several others), but overall, I got things, and was able to successfully finish my projects and complete the term.
Oh - and I had to upgrade my gcc compiler, and a host of other things - because the version of gcc wasn't C++ 11 - which of course is what they were using mostly. So I got to do some unspeakable things to my workstation (and basically fubar'd it so bad I can't do an upgrade any longer - not without some serious work, but I'll leave that to the end of term 3)...
I guess what I'm saying here is that the experience on the Udacity course led me to the agreement with your premise; C++ isn't really that difficult to pick up the basics of if you already have Python (and maybe some other languages) under your belt.
That said - I am looking forward to seeing what Jai brings, if it is ever released to the public...
C++ is special because it combines two big ideas:
- Zero-cost abstractions (you only pay for what you use)
- High-level abstractions (OOP, lambdas, code-generation, etc. )
I would jump straight to C++ 17. It looks completely different to early 2000s C++ and makes functional programming easier (type inference, lambdas, constexpr, etc. ).
If you learn to use C++ well, you will be able to write faster code faster.
True in theory and essentially because C++ still remains mostly a superset of C, but unfortunately the majority of C++ programmers I've met tend to overabstract and not realise it, making this claim not really true in practice.
High-level abstractions (OOP, lambdas, code-generation, etc. )
On the other hand, this is definitely true in practice.
I think this notion is out-of-date. Have a look at this slide: https://youtu.be/_wzc7a3McOs?t=21m37s It shows how C++ has evolved away from just "C with Classes".
I agree that many C++ programmers over-abstract things.
I meant that C code, with few modifications, will basically work fine when compiled with a C++ compiler.
I'd love to, but there are simply no (accessible?) resources. I'd love a "how to write C++17 with no baggage" book, but it simply doesn't exist. (please, correct me if I'm wrong?)
I really want to get to know C++, it looks like it's become a fantastic language, but in all seriousness, I could write fast, performant robust Go within a weekend, I'm proficient in half a dozen other languages, and C++ programmers still unironically suggest a stack of books the height of a small table to beginners.
The Book is intended for all C++
developers, regardless of their experience. The
beginner and intermediate developers will benefit
the most from the book in their attempt to become
prolific with C++.
Experienced C++
developers, on the other hand, will find a good
reference for many C++11, C++14, and C++17
language and library features that may come in
handy from time to time.I understand your reservations but keep in mind that the blog post is intended for an audience that has already bought into C++ programming and therefore, may want to improve their baseline C++ skills.
It's not an an evangelism article to convince those not using C++ right now.
That said, to answer your question directly... I think that programmers who require high-performance code with low-to-zero cost abstractions will self-select into C or C++ ecosystems. In other words, a programmer thinking about writing a web app to track food recipes isn't going to be perplexed about choosing "C++? vs Ruby? vs COBOL?". Like you hinted at, the domain of the app constrains what the programming languages will be realistically chosen.
I get that. Maybe I should have added a disclaimer to that end.
> In other words, a programmer thinking about writing a web app to track food recipes
You're maybe the 5th person who's made thinly veiled barbs about me being one of those despised subhuman web developers, so I'll just answer this once and for all :
Though I have written web apps in the past, I'm not really a web developer. What I am is a developer who builds shit that people use - be it desktop apps, mobile apps, games or web-apps. I don't give two shits if I'm using RubyScript or a goddamn magnetized needle : if I need the tool I'll happily learn it. My only problem here is I can't find a good reason to learn C++. That's all.
Weird considering that was my specific question.
> considering it's like 20% of the US economy
The disproportionate size and role of the parasitic financial sector is a tragedy for the modern US economy.
Moreover I wasn't asking about job opportunities per se - like you so astutely pointed out I can just search for those. I was more interested in what could I personally use C++ for that didn't involve joining a large dev team working on some unspecified codebase.
Are you asking about the ROI in terms of learning and personal growth? Then it's tremendous. The language that you probably are using (Java or C#) was written because most average programmers couldn't handle the power and flexibility of C++, so industry developed those languages as lookalikes with training wheels. If you've ridden a bike with training wheels your whole life, then aren't you at least curious at some point to see what it's like with them taken off?
If nothing else, then you'll learn why decisions were made the way they were in derivative languages, and become a better programmer overall. It gives you certain amount of confidence to have experience in a language that most people are afraid of.
Universities are a much longer and unfortunately financially inaccessible route for me. Going to try the "build-a-portfolio-and-start-freelancing" approach.
From http://www.ensisoft.com/temp/cplusplus_stack.png (why is this a PNG and not a JPEG?), Modern C++ Design and C++ Template Metaprogramming are likely to be the most challenging. Don't get me wrong, they are fantastic works, but are probably not what you need right now.
C++ Primer, C++ Common Knowledge, and API Design for C++ are books that I think you should consider that are not listed in the post above. If you have never studied computer architecture it is an important subject to understand. There are good books like Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective, but others may have different opinions.
Is the JPEG question a test? If so I don't know!
The last ones you mentioned sound good, and I think I'll add those to my list and start with Accelerated C++ and see how that feels.
I appreciate the info!
If you're asking me to be specific, then I'd like to compare the ROI of developing greater C++ intuition vs. developing better machine learning intuition.
> If you've ridden a bike with training wheels your whole life, then aren't you at least curious at some point to see what it's like with them taken off?
Like just about everyone here, I've spent years of my life writing C in systems and OS classes. Are the OO abstractions that Cpp layers on top of C really that important for my personal growth? I don't see it unless I have something practical I can use it for.
> If nothing else, then you'll learn why decisions were made the way they were in derivative languages, and become a better programmer overall. It gives you certain amount of confidence to have experience in a language that most people are afraid of.
This is the definition of hand-wavy, and sounds a lot like the reasons the people on HN give for learning functional languages like Lisp and Haskell that you deride so much.
I'm a seasoned C++ developer; I can confidently apply for any job that requires years of C++ experience.
I don't find much intellectual satisfaction in that work.
If you're able to self-actualize with C++, good for you; it doesn't work for everyone.
C++, along with C, which you should also know if you know C++ is also used in the embedded software industry. Because it C++ is still essentially C, you write code for these tiny, bare metal embedded systems and still take advantage of some advanced features like classes, templates, etc...
Where I live, C++ coders are in high demand in various fields, just to let you know.
What fields, aside from embedded? I'm genuinely curious.
Personally, I mostly work around embedded/industrial systems and everything that goes with it such as test and simulation tools. I know some people who work in scientific computing and C++ is used in this domain too.
* Graphics
* Infrastructure (web servers and browsers, OS's, drivers, etc)
* Any desktop apps that are CPU/memory intensive. think image processing, video editing, even office applications
* Finance
* Games
* AI. GPUs are becoming more popular for training machine learning models, and C and C++ are pretty much dominating this space with OpenCL, CUDA, etc.
You mentioned in previous comments that browsers and stuff don't really count because you're not going to be implementing a browser that competes with the big four. But people have to work on maintaining those browsers. Same with MS office, Photoshop, etc.
The world pretty much runs on C and C++. From the steering column in your car to the computational fluid dynamics models that predict hurricanes and save lives, to the telephone switches that route your cell phone calls. Until pretty much every important piece of digital technology, small or large, switches over to a new language, there will be a need for C and C++ developers.
People do, but I won't be learning C++ to apply for a job maintaining some gigantic piece of software. I never asked about the job market for C++ developers, because there obviously is one somewhere and I can just search the job boards for them.
Implied in my question, or so I thought, is what kind of project can I use C++ for - not what kind of future employment opportunities could I enjoy if I developed professional-caliber proficiency with C++. I was looking for a reason to use C++ as an individual, not as part of the Chrome or Safari team in 5 years time.
And what is good for the pros is good for you too. There is a small caveat about game dev though. While C++ is probably the best language for writing game engines, if your plan is to write an indie game, this is probably a bad place to start. You should probably pick up an existing engine and build your gameplay on top of it using the associated scripting language instead. Writing your own engine can be both fun and instructive but it is not the easy path towards a complete game.
Yeah, definitely not and it's kind of an insane undertaking IMO given how full featured engines & frameworks like Unity have gotten.
Maybe I need to take another look at Unreal, given that C++ is sort of the first class dev language for the framework - for now at least.
This is something I've sort of been poking at this entire thread : there are fewer opportunities for developers to use lower level languages (aside from at work, if the job calls for it - but numerically speaking most jobs don't call for systems-tier languages anymore). Many of our day jobs involve higher level languages (which in my case means Scala), and for the overwhelming majority of solo projects there are languages that are quicker / easier / more effective to ship with than say C++.
I disagree. Most desktop apps are written with some kind of bytecode language (like my code editors and IDEs) with a few being written in C++ for very specific reasons (like my web browsers).
> When you add C
I wasn't asking about C
That's maybe true for your Dev tools but not for general purpose apps. MS Office, Adobe products, video players and other stuff regular people use are written in C++.