Hacker News Reader

Comment by mihaigalos | Hacker News Reader

As far as I'm concerned, C++ is there for legacy purposes only.

There are some nice frameworks and tools using it, sure. Yes, you are required to learn it if you are studying CS.

Any serious new development today is done using more modern languages such as Rust (i.e.: the linkerd service mesh proxy [1] for encrypted pod communication in a k8s cluster).

As even the Linux kernel is slowly transitioning to using Rust [2], it's only a matter of time before an inflection point is reached and it goes mainstream (if not already.)

[1] https://github.com/linkerd/linkerd2-proxy

[2] https://hackaday.com/2022/05/17/things-are-getting-rusty-in-...

View on HN

Hahaha wow. There are more than 5 million C++ programmers out there. Starting new C++ projects every day. I am pretty sure more new C++ projects are started every day than Rust projects. Everything (including Rust) runs on top of browsers/operating systems/drivers/compilers/VMs written in C/C++. Rust code is like a drop in the ocean compared. Maybe in 30 years that will changed? Don’t count on it.

Just learned that LLVM, GCC, CUDA, HPC, HFT and the whole games industry aren't serious new development.

.. is it new development?

I guess, unless you're into retro-gaming.

To be fair, parts of my work codebase are touching on 25 years old, and I work for a startup from 2020. The codebases we're building on have roots in the mid 90s, and the platforms they run on didn't support modern C++ standards for a very long time after that.

So anything including "windows.h" isn't really new development then? Sounds like a strange definition.

I'd say that there is a lot of new projects being started with C++, still way more than there are new projects in Rust, at least if you only count serious ones.

I mean a lot of these things rely on copying old code. AFAIK a lot of new games in bigger studios start by essentially copying the old engine into a new tree.

Nope. Ex. game developer here. New C++ projects and libraries are started every single day.

GCC is from the 80s, Unreal and Source are both from the 90s, and LLVM and CUDA are from the 2000s.

Yeah, I'd call all of those codebases pretty old at this point.

> I guess, unless you're into retro-gaming.

So new (same-)old development then?

> Any serious new development today is done using more modern languages such as Rust

Uhm, no. Sorry, thanks for playing, try again.

robotics is primarily c++ and python. that may change to being rust and python, but it will definitely take some time.

My impression as a CS grad is that very few computer science courses require you to learn C++.

I'm studying Mathematical Informatics and we have C++ as the first language.

It really depends on what bit of computer science you are learning.

C++ is definitely past its prime and has been surpassed in many areas by other languages but there are still a bunch of domains where it is the primary language.

How about almost all domains? Everything in the world runs on top of browsers/operating systems/drivers/VMs/networks/embedded systems etc. that are written in C/C++. Not to mention that the tools used to design chips and manufacture them are also written in C/C++. No other language comes even close.

Having C or C++ somewhere in the lower levels of your stack doesn't make them the primary language for your domain. Other wise CPU microcode would be the primary language of every domain.

In fact there is plenty that can be expressed only in C++. A person making effective use of the power of the language finds anything else a huge step down.

Anyone not having fun when coding C++ is doing it wrong.

Example of some well-written code that expresses things that can only be expressed in C++?

I'm far from the most experienced in C++, but friend classes/functions do not seem to have a direct equivalent in any other language.

In C#, nested classes are effectively friends with their outer class, and it's used quite often in practice.

On the other end of expressivity, in Eiffel, every class member is declared as visible to specific other classes; if you want something to be public, you say that it's visible to ANY, which is the universal base class similar to e.g. Object in Java.

Because you don’t need them in other languages.

NB: Friend-this and -that are not among powerful features of C++.

what languages you learn at university highly depends on the specific school you are at, the professors, and which companies are donating the most money. it's certainly not a great representation of what is going on in the industry as a whole.

My impression is that C++ is used in the real world though. :)

Yes that is true but I'm responding to the up stream comment saying "you are required to learn it if you are studying CS". There is a common perception that computer science degrees are about learning things like C++ but my experience is that most emphasise more abstract skills like data structures, algorithms, complexity, formal program design, etc.

Not at all. Computer science and engineering (I think this is different degrees in US but in Spain it was a BS + Master when I studied) is about algorithms, data structures, big O notation complexity in algorihtms, client/server architecture, hardware and assembly, understanding all the underlying math, networking, even HPC and advanced data structures when you keep choosing specialized subjects, but not learning a single tool for the sake of it for programming.

In fact, it is the least relevant part when you are studying. You learn tools better after you end the degree IMHO.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com