Comment by nickysielicki | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickysielicki | Hacker News Reader

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Using <algorithm> makes your code faster, simpler, and safer. Using <format> makes your code faster, simpler, and safer.

I’m so sick of people beating up on C++. The C++ community is in a moral panic to explain why it’s not as safe as rust and coming up with a ten step plan to fix all of the things wrong with it, but the reality is that it’s users like this that give it a bad rep. The same program in idiomatic modern C++ is on average slightly faster than C, significantly safer than C, and usually shorter than C. C++ does not need to apologize for its sins. C++ exceptions are not the end of the world. Templates since C++20 with concepts are ergonomically nicer to use than Java generics (and using them generously can make your code safer), and above all else, it’s a universal language that’s worth investing time in. Mastering C++, or at least attempting to in earnest, will make you a better programmer no matter what language you use for work.

/rant from a C developer that misses C++ every day

What I had read somewhere is that some of the features of C++ are slow and will require runtime support with extra functions, but some features of C++ are as fast and efficient as C so is not a problem.

I dislike many of the features of C++ and would do them differently, although some things do help. For example, I think that they should not have allowed to overload = and , operators, and I think that features of GNU C such as zero-length arrays and zero-length structures are helpful even though apparently in C++ a structure cannot really have zero length (but in C it can), but my opinion is I think it should be possible for your own structure or union type to overload any operators that are not already defined, including reading through and writing through a pointer (if you define the structure type as having a specific type that it points to; by default it does not point to anything). For example:

  struct X x;
  struct X y;
  (...)
  *x=*y; // This line can be overloaded assignment and dereferencing
  x=y; // This line cannot be overloaded assignment
  x+y; // This line can be overloaded addition, since addition on structure types is not normally defined

> I think that they should not have allowed to overload = and , operators

Comma operator I would agree is really only used for shenanigans. But operator= is as crucial as the copy/move constructors for ownership, so I'm not sure how you picture this...

> apparently in C++ a structure cannot really have zero length

Yes it can: https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/attributes/no_uni...

> I think it should be possible for your own structure or union type to overload any operators that are not already defined

I see that you are trying to solve the problem of "when reading this code, I don't know if these are the built-in operators or custom ones". I would be interested in learning about situations in which this was a problem for you, because I have not made that experience myself. From my perspective, you need to know the types of x and y to know in the first place which operations are possible - default or custom - so this rule does not really buy you much. But again, I don't think I understand your problem well enough.

FWIW, you can define a custom operator-> and operator* (they have to return pointers, or types that themselves have operator->/operator* which are then applied recursively). I am not convinced that mixing pointer-related semantics into e.g. object assignment is a sufficiently elegant solution from a conceptual perspective though.

> > apparently in C++ a structure cannot really have zero length

> Yes it can: https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/attributes/no_uni...

A structure with no members can be made to have zero length as a member of something else but not as part of its own definition. I.e., the `[[no_unique_address]]` attribute is a property of the member, not of the struct on its own. It's somewhat annoying that you can't flag an empty struct as being really empty, and have no-unique-address-ness applied everywhere it's used automatically; you have to flag every use with the attribute manually.

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