Comment by codingthewheel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codingthewheel | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Do you really think this is a fair comparison? Web dev has never been C++'s strong point. I could as well say, "so, I've been using Haskell for desktop and console gaming. After 6 years, I moved to C++ and man, I never want to code a line of Haskell again." Because it's a completely inappropriate language choice.

Also re: maintainability. C++ is completely maintainable, and built from the ground up for maintainability specifically in large projects.

Don't blame C++ for the sins of Microsoft (managed C++ extensions, DLL HEll, C++ COM interfaces, compiler support classes, 9 different string types). Don't blame C++ for the sins of gcc. At some point we need to distinguish between the (pure) LANGUAGE and the (often politically motivated) TOOLSET.

I'm not comparing C++ with ruby for webdev. I just said that I moved to a webdev job from a realtime trading job where we used c++. I'm just saying that my mental state of mind at work has become much better because of the change. I'm purely talking about language differences. One simple exaple is the difference in time it takes to code a snippet that iterates over an array of arrays. In c++ this would take me atleast 15 minutes (finding all the types involved, compiles for error checking etc) with no test written. In ruby I cud have everything done in 1 minute.

The better the tool you use the less stress it puts on you the builder.

I don't think actually that C++ as a language is a inappropriate for web dev, but it lacks the great frameworks that more popular choices have (RoR, Django etc).

Agreed. There is no really good web framework for C++. This is a weakness of C++ going forward. I suppose you could do ASP.NET or ASP.NET MVC with C++/CLI...though in that case it would seem C# or VB.NET is indicated...

I am not sure, a lot of convenience of modern web frameworks is made possible using introspection and other runtime facilities, which are too minimal in C++.

Don't blame C++ for the sins of Microsoft

Most of those sins were committed specifically to address weaknesses in C++.

A language without a first-class late-binding model is fundamentally broken. Don't blame Microsoft for trying, however ineffectively, to fix it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com