Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

Plenty of people cycle on a fixie too. So what? C, especially modern C, does provide metaprogramming and abstraction facilities. In practice, you can even get things like the "defer" construct from other languages: https://lwn.net/Articles/934679/

The question isn't "Can I write a game in C?". Yes, of course you can, and it's not even that painful. The question is "Why would you?", and then "Why would you brag about it?"

> C++ covers my needs, but fails my wants badly. It is desperately complicated. Despite decent tooling it's easy to create insidious bugs. It is also slow to compile compared to C. It is high performance, and it offers features that C doesn't have; but features I don't want, and at a great complexity cost.

C++ is, practically speaking, a superset of C. It being "complicated"? The "insidious bugs"? It being "slow to compile"? All self-inflicted problems. The author of this article can't even fall back on the "well, my team will use all the fancy features if I let them use C++ at all!" argument pro-C-over-C++ people often lean on: he's the sole author of his projects! If he doesn't want to do template metaprogramming, he... just doesn't want to do it.

I don't read these sorts of article as technical position papers. People say, out loud, "I use C and not C++" to say something about themselves. ISTM that certain circles there's this perception that C is somehow more hardcore. Nah. Nobody's impressed by using it over a modern language. It really is like a fixie bicycle.

If he doesn't use C++ features then there's no point of bothering with C++ at all. C++ is kinda but not really a superset of C. There are some nice features that are lacking in C++.

The fixie example wants to make the comparison that using C instead of C++ is deliverately done just to brag about doing something in a way that is more difficult than in should be. In reality the issue is that C++ might not offer you any benefit at all and it could potentially bring you issues later on for things such as interfacing with other languages.

I personally do not see the point of using C++ if you do not use any of its features.

Usually you start with just one feature, like std::map instead of OpenSSL's abomination of a hashmap library or rolling your own.

Of course you should use std::unordered_map instead of std::map because the latter is actually a treemap, but you probably don't know that when you first learn it...

Nah, I prefer to just use C, because at least I can parse the quite sane and helpful error diagnostics when I omit a semicolon or something, instead of getting 15 pages of unreadable garbage dumped into my lap by the oh-so-wonderful C++ standard library.

(Which quite frankly isn't much of a "standard" when there's about a dozen different real world interpretations of the code depending on which flavor of which compiler from which year that you're using.)

I also don't have to wait eons for my code to compile. Really, the mental and computational load of C has got to be 1/10 of C++.

What a nightmare C++ is, and it just keeps getting worse every year thanks to the incompetent standards committee.

LPT: scroll up to the top of the error message. Typically it's "could not match this function call" followed by "here's all the things that might match and why they don't match"

> People say, out loud, "I use C and not C++" to say something about themselves. ISTM that certain circles there's this perception that C is somehow more hardcore.

Sounds like this is just you projecting.

Almost any language has fewer footguns than C++, and thus programmers will take almost anything else over C++.

It's just incidental that "anything else" also includes C.

"Practically speaking" means nothing. Use "from my confused point of view", instead.

If GDB could switch its C codebase to compiling as C++ without major surgery, it's close enough.

> I don't read these sorts of article as technical position papers.

I do.

> People say, out loud, "I use C and not C++" to say something about themselves.

Just like you are telling us something about yourself right now.

> ISTM that certain circles there's this perception that C is somehow more hardcore.

That's not why we use it.

There are certainly many noobs who think C is hardcore. That just goes to show how low the bar has fallen since the masses rushed into computing.

Many of these people also think of changing their own oil or a flat tire as being a superpower. Some could not identify the business end of a screwdriver if their life depended on it. Their opinion on the relatively difficulty or impressiveness of anything is to be taken with a huge grain of salt.

There are many good reasons to use C. If nothing else it demonstrates that the user is a free thinker and not a fucking muppet. It's the sort of thing that attracts me and drives you away. That's valuable.

> Nobody's impressed by using it over a modern language.

1) The word "modern" is not a magic talisman that makes anything it's attached to automatically worthy.

2) "Nobody" does not mean what you apparently think it means. Free clue: others exist in the world beside yourself and your self-absorbed clique.

3) Nobody with a brain is impressed by whatever the midwits are doing. Anyone who can fog a mirror can follow the herd off the nearest cliff. It's the outliers who are impressive.

4) Technically anything since the 1500s is "modern." It's such a vague, useless word that serves no purpose other than "virtue" signalling.

C++ is fucking garbage. Always has been. Keeps getting worse and worse every year. Enjoy your PAGES full of indecipherable gibberish ("error diagnostics"), your miserably slow compile times, and your closet full of footguns and decades old sticks of sweating dynamite. Slowest language by far, other than the so very modern abomination that is Rust. You can keep it.

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