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Comment by ahartmetz | Hacker News Reader

Dunno. As a mainly C++ developer I think Rust is a real alternative because it tries to solve the same problems better. Lisp and Haskell do not solve the same problems. Huge Lisp codebases probably become hard to understand quickly, and both Lisp and Haskell don't produce very efficient code (or make it hard to produce efficient code).

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Time will tell. At the moment I'm not convinced. Rust is a marginal improvement which is not worth the trade-offs in terms of immaturity, lack of libraries, books, standardization, etc. It might end up just like D. Or it might actually find itself a viable niche.

AFAICS D screwed up with its "optional" but really not optional if you want to use the standard library garbage collection. Rust contains no such mistakes, and seems to contain fewers mistakes than C++. Any experienced C++ programmer should know that C++ contains plenty of mistakes. Exceptions are very awkward, the string class is useless, hash maps are much slower than they could be (the std API enforces that), modules should have appeared 20 years ago, non-const references as stealth pointers are bad for readability, [...]

Why C++ string class is useless?

It's basically no better than vector<my_char_type> - i.e. it has no Unicode support whatsoever and very few string-specific convenience methods. Using algorithms is possible, but tedious.

Because I often work with Qt, I'm comparing it with QString, which is much more than a vector of chars. https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qstring.html

Well, you just kinda answered your question. There is STL, Qt and Boost. Like all other languages. They do the same thing but in different capacities, you should select based on your needs. I think std::string can be supplemented for Unicode support, I am gonna say the fmt library was the supplement but I feel like I am wrong.

I used std::string and QString extensively for 4-5 years and find QString inexplicably bloated and un-intuitive for my use cases.

I don't understand your problem with QString, but anyway, AFAIK the common way to get Unicode support with std::string is ICU. ICU is quite large (~15-20 MB binary) and it breaks binary compatibility with every release.

I don't do C++ anymore professionally, but from I remember, std::locale was very useful: https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/locale

And QString had no magic to it other than wrapping its underlying data in ytf-16 which std::u16string does too.

It's not perfect but it gets the job done, IIRC.

> "[Lisp and] Haskell don't produce very efficient code (or make it hard to produce efficient code)."

Curious here. Are you speaking from experience -- i.e. you tried and failed -- or is this simply something you guess must be true? People write high-performance software in Haskell, and it's their tool of choice.

> People write high-performance software in Haskell, and it's their tool of choice.

I've heard of those but have never managed to see one. Do you have some examples ? (to give you my "baseline" - handling >500k messages/second on a desktop cpu for instance as this is something quite easily achievable in C++)

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