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Comment by jjtheblunt | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if that is a symptom of C++ having many recent revisions, thereby influencing, misleadingly, the definition of "experienced".

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Yeah, I have 15 years of C++ experience, but not since 2012. So with C++11 and C++17 (and soon C++20) my skills have not aged well, even though I can still write C++03 just fine. It's no wonder 'senior' devs prefer to use plain C, where even C11 is not that different from C99.

> my skills have not aged well

I don't think that's necessarily the case. C++'s famed backwards compatibility, source of so many issues, is also a fabulous strength. There's nothing stopping one from writing C++03, while gradually adapting C++11 and beyond as time/circumstances permit (which is what I'm doing at my job, maintaining a massive legacy codebase while stymied by slow uptake on newer compilers by my corporate overlords...)

> It's no wonder 'senior' devs prefer to use plain C

Not this senior (in years, at least :)) dev. I've tasted RAII and I can't go back...

The problem from Dropbox's perspective is that they're not merely hiring someone to create a solo greenfield C++ codebase, but to contribute quickly to a codebase written in whatever arbitrary subset of C++ they blessed.

C is just easier to keep most of the rules in your head for. I prefer C any day, especially in an embedded system.

i agree

Funny, I too stopped using C++ around 2011. Recently I had to delve into Swift and learn it with great urgency... then my project changed direction toward C++ and Qt.

I find the '14 and '17 additions vastly improve C++ and in fact added things that I had just come to appreciate in Swift. So don't be too put off; learning the new stuff will help you if you need to adopt a more-recent language too.

I tried using C++ and Objective C several years ago.

Compilation was incredibly slow. Maybe when C++ modules finally arrive things will improve.

I take it you haven't tried Swift ;)

Or (shudder) Scala. The only time I ever think “oh, this computer is a bit slow” of modern high end laptops is when it comes to Scala.

I like the language, but the compiler is painful.

Yep. I’ve got a 9 year old Scala repo on Github:

https://github.com/melling/scala

I actually like the language but stopped using it because it was so slow to compile. I hear that it has gotten better so I’ve been revisiting it.

Worksheets seem to help with development.

Personally I find the tooling and documentation around the ecosystem to be very painful. SBT itself is also incredibly slow.

Bloop is making things quite a bit better, but totally one of the hardest parts of the language.

I recently had to use a bit of Scala for some load-testing, I've never had so much trouble doing something seemingly so trivial; in this case, sending a JSON HTTP request. It was honestly a matter of hours. Pretty humbling experience!

Sure. I’ve been using Swift since 1.0. It’s a great language. I rewrote 50,000 lines of Objective C (and the C++ part) into Swift.

http://appstore.com/h4labs

I like it a lot. It's really too bad Android doesn't use it as a native language.

I used to maintain a couple of systems that between them were around 4 million lines of C++. Initially, in 2004, it would take about 16 hours to do a clean build. By the time I left that job, due to better hardware, precompiled headers and reduced dependencies, and smaller code for same functionality, clean build was down to 45 minutes.

The biggest winner, in my experience, was reducing dependencies in headers. Use forword declarations, etc. Precompiled headers helped a lot on Windows, but less so on Linux for the same code (but it still helped).

Incremental builds were fairly snappy, a minute or two (pretty good for a large C++ project).

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