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Comment by James_K | Hacker News Reader

C++ has two ways of naming things: `std::incomprehensible_long_name` and `|`.

It's funniest when they're making keywords.

"Hmm, we need a new keyword to express this complicated idea about how geese move, in other languages they seem to use the keyword fly"

A1: Just re-use this existing four letter keyword 'swim'. Yeah, technically a goose can also swim but that's different, and the ideas aren't similar, and the implementation is entirely different, but this way we didn't need a new keyword so it's less work for a compiler right?

A2: Simple, new keyword complicated_goose_motion - why are people not happy with that?

At some point a noob will ask "Hey why can't we just name it `fly` like in Other Language?" and they will be ridiculed because of course several C++ companies have used the word fly as an identifier in software, and so reserving that word would incur a slight annoyance for them, whereas just forcing either A1 or A2 avoids a little work for those companies and is thus better...

Please, it would obviously be called co_fly.

I love C++ for the power it gives me, but boy do I hate reading C++ code. I know most of these things are for historical reasons and/or done because of parser compatibilities etc. but it's still a pain.

I used to live and breath C++ early 2000s, but haven't touched it since. I can't make sense of modern C++.

Thankfully, you can still write C++ just fine without the "modern" stuff and have not only readable code, but also sane compile times. The notion, explicitly mentioned in the article, that all this insane verbosity also adds 5 seconds to your build for a single executor invocation is just crazy to me (it is far longer than my entire build for most projects).

I am confused. Out of curiosity WDYM by 5 seconds being far longer than your entire build for most projects? That sounds crazy low.

It's not crazy, it's just what happens if you write mostly C with some conveniences where they actually make sense instead of "modern C++". I generally write very performance sensitive code, so it's naturally fairly low on abstraction, but usually most of my projects take between one and two seconds to build (that's a complete rebuild with a unity build, I don't do incremental builds). Those that involve CUDA take a bit longer because nvcc is very slow, but I generally build kernels separately (and in parallel) with the rest of the code and just link them together at the end.

Sure, C++ is heavy for compilation, there's simply more by the compiler to do, but code repository building under 5 seconds is at the very low end of tail so making the point about someone bearing with the 5 seconds longer build time is sort of moot.

I wrote a lot of plain C and a lot of C++ (cumulatively probably close to MLoC) and I can't remember any C code that would compile in such a short time unless it was a library code or some trivial example.

> I can't make sense of modern C++

A lot of it is about making metaprogramming a lot easier to write and to read.

No more enable_if kludges since if constexpr (and concepts for specific stuff); and using concepts allows to better communicate intent (e.g.: template<typename I> can become template<std::integral I> if you want the template to be used only with integer types, and so on)

You may want to watch some of Herb Sutters videos. He is one of the few sane people left in the upper echelon of C++ supporters

Only if by power you mean performance. Otherwise C++ is not a very ”powerful” language.

I’d like to see an example of a task that can be done with less verbosity in C++ than say, Python, using only the standard library

    ++foo; // Increment value of foo by one

    foo += 1 # Increment value of foo by one

Something more complicated maybe ? Like say parse arguments from a command line ?

This post is a prime example of the latter syntax which looks like a crow was jumping on a snow, and is equally readable.

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