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Comment by nacozarina | Hacker News Reader

C++ is so bloated that every project must outlaw multiple parts of it from being used on their project. Using the whole language is an explicit antipattern.

Every project must colonize a valley of the language, declare a dialect, and bit-fiddle their own thing.

It might be a measure of popularity, but not of unity.

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That's how all programming languages work. Have you used 100% of the features in any language you've used? Ever?

It's not the same though. The breadth is wildly different. In the case of things like JavaScript, C, or Go it can be said that you use -most of it- in a day to day to basis, sure, not the most magic, deep crap, but not the same can be said about C#, Rust, C++ etc on which you have a lot of features simply not used.

Rust hasn't grown 17 ways to initialize a variable yet. Most projects use most features.

When projects choose a subset of language features, it's dictated by their needs (like embedded programs disabling the standard library, or safety-critical libraries forbidding "unsafe" code out of caution). There are some people who vocally hate async, but their complaint is usually that everyone uses async even where it's unnecessary (meaning that it actually has very broad adoption).

This feels very different than having an unwanted C subset, some '98 features that were replaced in '11 and '13, with fixes for them in '20 and '26 and then projects taking years to settle on a new baseline, and still bickering whether exceptions may be allowed or not.

Rust has "editions" that let new projects disable old misfeatures (which it hasn't got many yet). Rust ecosystem is fully on board with the latest version.

not close to 100%, but i think i can say i ultilize most of feature of C, must more than C++.

As a Python dev, I really hate the whole “Pythonic” idea. There isn’t just one way to do this.

Honestly... who cares? The dictionary is pretty thick, but I still speak English without much trouble.

Open up an old Java code base, and your IDE will tell you to refactoring tons of code, as it was written in an old way it thinks you shouldn't use anymore, uses deprecated classes, etc.

Javascript is even more dramatic, where it will tell you to fix every single variable declaration, as people decided "var" was a mistake, and there is a whole new way of defining classes.

Var wasn't "a mistake", and there's still (albeit niche) use cases where var makes sense. But for most cases, you do want to write a let/const declaration, even though they're not "free" technically.

I normally disagree with such broad remarks, but in the case of C++ I agree. I sometimes see a less common feature of Python used and have to remind myself of the syntax and its usage. With C++, I start any project with the idea that I will only use a small subset of the available features. When I review other's code I pretty much need a language reference available at all times until I can settle into their particular flavor of C++

I wonder if a subset of the language could be formalized, as some kind of opt-in decision. Like when TSR divided Dungeons & Dragons into D&D and AD&D...

> Every project must colonize a valley of the language, declare a dialect, and bit-fiddle their own thing.

this is really not true in my experience. I don't remember last time I worked a project which outright banned specific C++ features or had a "dialect".

> It might be a measure of popularity, but not of unity.

Neither of which are great measures probably. What about usefulness?

to this day i don’t know what people mean by “features”.

Lambdas are nice to have, just don’t nest them more than once.

I kinda wish things like std::variant had shorter syntax.

if anything i’m not a fan of c++ introducing language features as long verbose functions than to confidently make it an operator or a keyword.

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