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Comment by qalmakka | Hacker News Reader

Or rather, given that every relevant C compiler is also a c++ compiler, just compile as c++ and use std::unique_ptr? I love C but I just can't understand the mental gymnastics of people that prefer this kind of hacks compared to just using C++

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Unfortunately, that's not true.

C is not 100% compatible with C++.

There's a whole heap of incompatibilities that you can hit, that will prevent a lot of non-trivial C programs from compiling under C++. Things like character literals being a char in C++ and an int in C. Or C allowing designated initialisers for arrays, but C++ not.

I know, but it's not incredibly hard to work with them to be fair. People have been mixing C and C++ for decades now, we know where the sharp edges are pretty well

There's a lot of either "I like to pretend C is simple and simple is good" or "C++ has things I don't like, so I will refuse to also use the things I do like out of spite". You see it all over the place here whenever C or C++ comes up.

Using C++ while keeping people on a common subset of C++ features is very hard in practice. Google for example do a pretty extreme amount of restrictive code standard, training, linting and reinventing libraries to that end.

A lot of the motivation behind inventing golang seems to be to remove C++ toys, because it's too hard to get people to not use them if they're there.

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