As one example, I recently found templated lambdas useful in making animations.
That is all there is to it.
And that utility library (there are dozens of them) is just as subject to debate and issues as libstdc++
I am not going to implement my own C versions of 90% of the stuff std:: provides, sorry.
And there lies the problem with C++: to be sure, you have to check. C++ code can't be taken at face value -- the most innocuous-looking code could be a ticking bomb.
You can't take C code at face value either. The name of a method or type doesn't tell you what it does. It could longjmp for all you know.
For Python, it's very little (nothing?). For Rust, you get more than most; lifetimes tell you whether it holds onto a pointer you give it.
Years ago, I was really proficient in C++, but after a year of programming in C#, I realized that not once had the behavior of my code caught me off guard. In the following years, I only ran into quirky behavior a couple of times. I could finally program without the constant mental overhead of watching out for C++ pitfalls.
Seems strange to talk down C++ while praising C#, which incidentally has been getting features to increase its use where Microsoft previously might have used C++ instead.
You catch pitfalls in any language the same way, using static analysis, which C authors introduced right in 1979, acknowledging the issues with language, which they decided to outsource to another tool, instead of improving the language.
A long tradition in computing.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree here. And of course, even if C++'s user base seems to be shrinking, it still works well for some categories of programmers.
Swift, C#, Kotlin, Scala, Rust, Typescript, Python...
Yeah C# is getting a bit unwidely.
I went to some lengths with D to discourage such abusive operating overloading practice.
Slides:
C++ folks are very much into their language, and can't seem to understand that most folks don't want to dedicate significant amounts of mental resources purely to language details.
Regards, an embedded dev.
With Android, iDevices, PlayStation, Switch, and everyone that had proprietary compilers down using downstream forks from clang, due to the more appealing license.
Who is left still using GCC, other than existing projects lacking a clang backend for a snowflake embed CPU?
In any case, if it is a modern GCC release past 2012, it was compiled with C++ as well.
With time, the GCC developers acknowledged the benefits of using C++ over C, and migrated the code.
GCC requires a C++ compiler to bootstrap since around 2012, and GNU coding standards has been updated to several languages beyond C, time to go up with times.
Unless of course, you don't have anything to do, and feel like bootstraping GCC 16, using a compiler chain all the way back to 2012 thereabouts.
D was implemented in "C with Classes" and then translated to D and bootstrapped. There isn't a line of C code in it.
Over time, we gradually replace the C-isms and C++isms and anachronisms in it to native D-isms.
The problems of the code I'm writing far exceeds the complexity of the language. Your complaint about complexity fall flat to me, unless you are working on a trivial program you need to deal with things far more complex than any language.
For example, the standard says that adding elements to an <unordered_map> is not allowed to invalidate references to keys or elements within the map. That makes it impossible for any standards-compliant C++ implementation to use a high-performance implementation in which keys and elements are stored contiguously in a flat array.
The context of this thread is that someone stated that the C++ standard library sucks, and someone replied to them saying that it's just some implementations that suck, but that's separate from the language. The point I'm trying to make, in response, is that it is about the language. It's not just "some" implementations - there is no implementation of the C++ standard library that doesn't have these inefficiencies, because the language's own standard requires them.
(This is tangential but - this is why I often say that C++ is not actually the most complex language in the world, it's just over-specified. If you took almost any popular programming language and wrote a document dictating the behavior of every single feature and library to the same level of detail, you would end up with a document similar in length or even longer than the C++ standard.)
It's really hard to take your comment serious because of generalization like this. Maybe they're not usable for your particular usecase but that doesn't mean they suck. Just like there's a 'million' ways that C++ sucks in your book, there's a reason there's millions of lines of code out there where these containers are valid usecases and hence work without issues whatsoever nor a need to replace them with something else.
They're also unusable by the way because of ergonomic and software architecture factors, such as bad modularity, terrible compile times, unreadable error messages, unreadable symbol names...
Yes that is overgeneralizing a little bit but it's largely true.
The problem is typically not the containers themselves but all the other bad decisions that they push you to make in order to work around their "small issues".
The huge problem is that these containers can get you started quickly, i.e. leetcode type stuff and single threaded stuff, but at some point you'll realize your architecture ended up completely in the wrong place because of that.
If you haven't been thinking deeply about memory management and concurrency, you won't be able to understand, no offense meant. I've just fixed another subsystem that was completely overwhelmed, seeing 8x bandwidth gains already on a small testsystem, but the factor is basically unbounded when moving to bigger systems, when it's about contended vs uncontended.
Why is only 'high throughput, low frequency, massively concurrent work' considered 'serious'?
(Obviously I meant to say low latency, not low frequency)
What about these particular workloads (and the environments they're used in) make them 'serious' and why are other workloads 'lesser' and therefore the standard library 'suffices'? Why not use better containers for everything? Google, for instance, universally recommends Abseil.
Google also recommends using Golang in many cases, which was explicitly designed for not-so-experienced people. It is more geared towards creating services quickly and robustly, not towards squeezing out the last 10x of performance.
I can't say anything about abseil, having never used it. "By Google" is not an immediate seal of quality, and it doesn't mean that one size fits all. I've recently seen a list of .so objects required in order link grpc (also by Google), there were like dozens of abseil .so's in the list IIRC. I don't like it! In my experience, validated countless times in my own practice, complexity => slow and hard to maintain and simplicity => fast and easy to change.
Templatized C++ containers are generic recipes, they can't make use of local context and hence don't lead to the simplest solutions. They produce tons of boilerplate. They give you a decent single-threaded baseline performance in many cases, sure, but now start hammering these data structures using 16 CPUs in parallel... you might find that you should have designed your application completely differently.
Like WalterBright says, I too use very simple data structures almost exclusively (arrays, linked lists, linear allocation). Most of these coded ad-hoc everywhere, very straightforward, very adaptable. Even hash maps I only use infrequently -- if I can, I just make keys such that I can index directly. I get performance from knowing exactly what happens, and minimize the work that needs to happen. I create immutable data objects (write-once) where possible. I've created my own pooled block-allocator for power of 2 sized allocations with book-keeping in shadow-memory (preventing fragmentation), massively reducing syscalls that modify virtual memory mappings and closely controlling memory used by various subsystems.
I don't expect a library like abseil to solve many of my problems, it probably makes some things "easy" by taking away the very control from me that I need to solve the problem I have, resulting in unsolved problems and complexity.
The map stuff the other posters summed up well but even std::vector is dogshit with pretty much all implementations having inlined grow code in push_back, a not too great API and missed optimisations e.g. no trivial relocation when growing the vector / moving it and no useful APIs such as "grow but don't initialise"...
But already the basic premise that you should push back without thinking is wrong. You will suffer reallocations and invalisations when you least expected them, and frankly you have to architect around that fact which is a terrible restriction. You can work around by pre reserving but at that point it's just a basic fixed heap allocated array but worse because the type gives you a weird look all the time, "I'll realloc as soon as you don't pay attention, harhar"!
The implementation always tries to grow (if necessary) to the exact size chosen for Vec::reserve_exact, but for plain Vec::reserve if growth is needed it always grows exponentially, not to the exact size, preserving the O(1) push cost.
For a typical "doubling" growable array type, if we're pushing groups of ten items, reserve_exact or C++ grows like 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100 ... which is much worse than O(1) whereas the correct reserve grows 10, 20, 40, 80, 160 preserving O(1)
For trivial types you can work around this in C++ with a little work, and for the non-trivial types you can work around it with a bunch more extra code, but you probably won't.
Bjarne among other people teaching C++ recommend just not using the reservation API as a reservation API because of this problem†, and the resulting teaching definitely leaks into CS graduates and even into languages which have the correct API and so you have to un-teach the bad lesson.
In applications where you actually can't afford to pay for growth (or at least in some cases can't afford this) I also like Vec::push_within_capacity which I believe comes from Rust for Linux where the kernel legitimately needs this "If there's room push, otherwise I have a plan B" approach.
† To Bjarne this API is instead conceived of as a way to preserve reference validity. Since it won't grow, our references will still work.
Realloc is pretty much never the right way in whatever form, and I've never seen any need to include realloc in any of my own allocators (mostly blockallocators and linear allocators and pools/free lists, sometimes using malloc/free).
Yes, Rust version allows you to maybe skip a reallocation step or two by doing explicit up front reallocation. But remember most allocation work is always from the last grow anyway. The Rust version seems like a microoptimization, giving a little bit more explicit control in a situation where you've already pretty much given up control and gone like, throw hands in the air, we're doing push_back()!
You're correct that this isn't a huge optimization. But it more than pulls its weight directly because it's a small boon when you're right and it doesn't have the terrible penalty that Vec::reserve_exact has when inevitably the programmer is sometimes wrong. It's very much about saving pennies, but the growable array type is so widely used that counting pennies makes sense.
I have a lot more thoughts about reservation, but these suffice for specifically the growable array type.
If you're counting pennies, Vec::reserve() (inexact) is hardly what you want, because in the worst case you're wasting a factor of 1.5x or 2x of elements due up-front overallocation. Maybe chunk lists could be better, overhead is bounded by chunk size and all operations are constant-time. No pointer invalidation either. And you can pool those chunks, preventing memory fragmentation and improving memory utilization, since there aren't a million different sized allocations in your process.
I think this is "Trump math" but assuming we're actually looking at the same over-allocation this isn't new, what you're calling "wasting a factor of 2x" was already what you were paying by using the amortized O(1) growable array type, that's its central trade off, so yeah, the type with that property does still have that property.
> Maybe chunk lists could be better, overhead is bounded by chunk size and all operations are constant-time.
Basically std::deque. Surely no more need be said ?
As I said, I don't think growable array data structure is a good idea.
> Basically std::deque. Surely no more need be said ?
Ok now you're really out of your depth here. Pretty sure you haven't actually used it, it's a somewhat obscure data structure even though the more serious C++ programmers have heard of it, most have probably never used it.
From a web search, std::deque seems to be pretty universally thought of as a weird and very bad data structure. I've had to learn myself because I did actually try to use it myself recently. Beyond being unintuitive to use due to being "abstract" (had 2-3 serious bugs, e.g. unexpected iterator invalidations that happened only under load), apparently std::deque is not even specified as a chunk list. O(1) random access must be guaranteed. So it must be much more complicated than that, I don't know the details though.
And while actual implementations do use chunks in some way (just not in a simple chunk list), apparently "chunks" is not a part of the std::deque spec, and hence there isn't anything standardized about the size of these chunks either.
- On MSVC, chunk size is 16 elements so chunk size of std::deque char is 16 BYTES !!!!! I was thinking they can't be serious, but apprently it is the case
- On GCC, chunk size is 512 byte fixed.
- On Clang, chunk size is 4096 byte fixed.
It _is_ a shithole, surely no more need be said?
It is still quite hard for me to take this seriously as a belief.
> Ok now you're really out of your depth here.
I don't think so. As you found, the consensus is that this sort of thing is a terrible idea. The O(1) complexity looks good superficially but your actual performance is miserable.
> I don't know the details though.
Raymond Chen has a pretty good explanation of the three implementations of std::deque, like he did for their std::string but Raymond's goal is to help you do forensics, he's not here to tell us which data structures are a good idea. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20230810-00/?p=10... might work, or, given Microsoft, it might already be dead by the time you click it.
Without knowing more about the details of the spec and of real world implementations [0], I'll boldly claim that the O(1) is the precise problem why this is a weird data structure (I never needed or expected that sort of constraint). It is not a chunk list, like many (including me) seem to have assumed.
I don't even have performance problems measured with this, also given that my std::deque is not currently in production, it is used as a simple streaming queue that only has a couple megabytes/second of bandwidth requirements, and it is not being built with MSVC (so chunks are going to be 512 or 4096 bytes). But it is a latent problem.
[0] Btw. I don't want to know the messy details of this right now, I need simple not complex. I've learned not to add more complexity in a futile attempt to fix things that are fundamentally broken. What use case is this going to be solved by std::deque, name me one such use case and tell me with a straight face that it's not a completely made up case or a super niche case that would likely also be better served by a different approach.
Or take it from someone else if you would, is Chandler Carruth high-profile enough and free enough of conflict of interest to be credible for saying that std::deque is dumb? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22962980
The thing C++ programmers tend to expect (though perhaps not you) is Rust's std::collections::VecDeque - the growable array type again but used as backing for a ring buffer.
This type has amortized O(1) push and pop at both ends, I assume since you didn't like the amortized growth of Vec / std::vector you'll feel the same way but that's what most programmers actually want from such a type - in use as a queue it won't repeatedly cycle allocations so long as the size is constrained, because it's a ring buffer. If you actually know the needed size up front the overhead from this structure, which can grow, versus a structure which can't grow, is a single integer for the capacity.
But as you saw, std::deque is... not that. STL wasn't able to explain what it's for when I asked him, so, if anybody knows it apparently doesn't include the people maintaining the C++ standard library implementations.
> Or take it from someone else if you would
I think the trouble here is that you've misconstrued this entire part of the conversation. I was gesturing at std::deque because it's terrible, and your response, that it's terrible, isn't a rebuttal as I think you're expecting. We agree on that, std::deque is terrible, our disagreement seems to be that you think a slightly different terrible data structure would be a good idea somehow and I do not.
That easily gives O(1) access to enqueue/dequeue, and the queue naturally grows and shrinks (even within configurable bounds) as part of reading and writing. Blocks can be taken and returned from/to some fixed size block pool. This design would be completely satisfactory. It's also very easy to code from scratch, so why should I settle for anything less, for example a growable vector where a reallocation would mean blocking other threads for extended time? But I was told to "not reinvent the wheel" and to "not overengineer it" so I tried to change my mind and make use of an STL container data structure.
> our disagreement seems to be that you think a slightly different terrible data structure would be a good idea
I don't know why you think that I would be thinking that, and I'm confused that you say you were gesturing at how std::deque is terrible, and not sure why I should be the one misconstruing something, when my premise from the beginning was "STL containers are terrible in many ways". And I don't get at all why you responded with "basically std::deque" to my "maybe chunk lists would better". It doesn't make the least bit of sense to me.
But let's settle this here, this is a pointless fight...
In the 1970s or 1980s that does feel entirely natural, but in the 1990s the 68040 and i486 both introduce L1 data cache and so now all list chasing hurts very badly, your structure is a list chase any time we index into the collection.
I think I can see a way to have what you're describing hit amortized O(1) push/ pop with the spikes which are amortized being more frequent (linear with capacity) but fixed size and smaller (allocate or free one block then do some housekeeping), it costs more RAM because of the block overhead and it is no longer contiguous, but I see that for your intended application you probably don't care about either problem.
Now that I think I understand your data structure better it's much less similar to std::deque than I had originally thought, it does seem very niche to me, but more power to you if you write such a type.
You would chunk this at a reasonable size, at least multiple kilobytes per chunk. That is not slow, it is basically the only way to do it. Yes, that is amortized, bounded overhead. Sure it costs a bit of extra RAM, like one extra pointer and maybe 1-2 integers per chunk? For chunks of 4 KB, this overhead is predictably less than 1 % plus less than 1 chunk worth of fragmentation in the last chunk. That is NOT unpredictable spikes of > 100 percent during reallocation or 100000 percent due to low utilisation...
I believe you can even instruct the CPU to preload the next buffer while still streaming the last, but personally have never had the need to dive _that_ deep. It would probably be very hard to measure any performance benefit from doing so. I like to write very basic straightforward C code, just solve the data structure problem first, not hand-wave it.
I do think about that, when needed. My point is that these containers can be 'good enough' in places where it doesn't really matter, not that they're always the go-to thing. E.g. I really don't see any issue using a map as part of a configuration type of object which gets read from args or json and which only gets used once at application start.
1. arrays
2. linked lists
3. hash tables
4. simple binary trees
Only the really big ones, e.g. here is Emscripten's allocator that focuses on small binary size and is implemented in about 1.5 kloc (ignoring comments and whitespace it's actually under 1 kloc), and that allocator is perfectly fine for most use cases (especially C code bases which typically don't have a high allocation frequency):
https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/blob/main/syst...
...and Seb Aaltonen's offset allocator (used for allocating GPU buffers in his Vulkan API wrapper) has under 500 lines of code:
https://github.com/sebbbi/OffsetAllocator/blob/main/offsetAl...
Right tool for the job etc... big general-purpose allocators like jemalloc or mimalloc are usually a bandaid to somewhat salvage a failed memory management strategy.
In the sense that C++ is complicated because it's C++, which is complicated? That's just a tautology. If you mean "the territory" in some other sense there's no reason to believe this.
In C++, you can overload the comma operator to do shit. I've seen it done. There's no reason to do it, and no reasonable person would ever expect it in a code base they're unfamiliar with. To find bug in that ultimately roots back to that implementation, you have to go eliminate every other whack-job possibility before it even occurs to you that maybe the weirdo who wrote this code chose to overload the comma operator.
I'm not going to argue with anyone who wants to use C++ in their own projects, you do you. But let's be real about what C programmers are complaining about. It's not line count. It's syntactic obfuscation. I don't just level this criticism at C++ either. Basically every major new language has its own byzantine syntactic constructs to some degree.