If you know of a language that has absolutely no unexpected behavior in its runtime under any workload, please let us know what it is!
And they don't even have a workaround for the GC assist being way too aggressive, they're just sucking it up and letting the latency exist.
Someone should let Microsoft know they need to rename their “C++ Runtime Library” package.
However, manual memory management makes development more expensive. Especially if you don't crunch numbers but parse strings. C++ probably ain't a good replacement for Go. For the last decades people and whole industries have been migrating the other way, from C++ to higher level memory safe languages, initially Java and C# then others followed.
I avoided mentioning that the C++ runtime was optional because I was trying not to be pedantic and I assumed in context it would be understood that this was irrelevant. I think I should’ve just made my point earlier, but:
- This all started with someone mentioning that C++ doesn’t have ‘bad runtime behavior’ because it doesn’t have a runtime, but this is false. It has a runtime, or to be exact, a specification for one, and I think it is safe to say a vast, perhaps extreme, majority of C++ developers are using it.
- If you opt to not use the runtime, then your runtime behavior is dictated somewhere else, but runtime behaviors don’t go away. In freestanding, you may be your own runtime, but then your runtime behavior is defined by the machine you’re running on. You just get to choose what layer of abstraction you are sitting on.
- edit: And also, as a point I forgot to mention initially, I don’t really feel like freestanding C++ vs standard Go is an apples-to-apples comparison.
I think the point was that the C++ has less runtime behavior, since it doesn’t have a scheduler or garbage collector, but extrapolating that to no runtime is wrong even if the runtime is optional.
BTW, C++ does have a scheduler. Optional like the rest of the runtime, but it’s 1 line of code away in all modern compilers, that line starts with #pragma omp.
However, even if you go to the extreme of not using any features that require runtime support, if you are using hosted C++, in practice you still have one bit of runtime: the entrypoint. Technically, an operating system could implement the bits that call main, but to the best of my knowledge none of them ever have. So every compiled binary from every hosted C++ implementation begins at the runtime library. (Admittedly, normally the C runtime library, since C++ doesn’t differ here, but that is just another layer deep of pedantics. In practice, everyone has a runtime.)
Nitpick: As far as I am aware OpenMP is not part of the language itself but an extension. But yeah, you could argue that is runtime scheduling in C++, I think.
The really obnoxious ones are std::stoi, stol, etc. which were added in C++11 as a replacement for strtol and friends, but throw on overflow/invalid input instead of returning a result type or a bool with out parameter.