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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

To be fair and assume competence: A lot of C++ programmers have been burned by adopting the latest and greatest bling, then having to port it to some backwards platform that doesn't have a recent compiler. Many of us use the legacy stuff when possible, because we know it works, there are already robust third party libraries that interoperate with the legacy stuff, and it is more likely to be portable than std::omfgbbq.

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This is getting better. Businesses that force a specific compiler for reasons other than technical merit are being punished in the market.

I am currently at a not super advanced C++ shop that has to write for several compilers on locked platforms, and even the worst/oldest compilers are clang or gcc forks that support C++17 and some C++20. We have robust CI and if it passes there we can use it (presuming it doesn't violate style guide/best practices/code review/etc). It is unlikely we will be burned by adopting the latest thing for anytime longer one developer is working on it.

I think the companies that are so afraid of upgrading software tooling and related processes incurred huge project costs because of otherwise needless major rewrites. One I worked for a college bookstore management software developer that was trying to rewrite their whole point of sale software. They were simply crushed by tech debt. Any fix in the original software took months and the rewrite wasn't finished before the company was bought by a competitor. Better unit tests, better practices staying up to date, better CI all would have contributed to business success.

Raises hand. Everyone needs to read "Effective C++", which is mostly a book about how not to shoot yourself in the foot with C++. The book is old enough now that the way he recommends writing C++ wouldn't make it into a PR.

So for that reason, I tended to write C+, which is pretty much C+, with some classes.

after rereading effective c++ with a decade away from c++, my main takeaway is that c++ shouldn't ever be used. The title should be "55 reasons to not use c++ for your next project"

I find that argument funny, given that Rust can't be updated often enough before every other library breaks.

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