Why code in C anymore?
drdobbs.com
drdobbs.com
I think the lack of reusability comes in object-oriented languages, not in functional languages. Because the problem with object-oriented languages is they've got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle. If you have referentially transparent code, if you have pure functions-all the data comes in its input arguments and everything goes out and leaves no state behind-it's incredibly reusable. You can just reuse it here, there, and everywhere. When you want to use it in a different project, you just cut and paste this code into your new project. Programmers have been conned into using all these different programming languages and they've been conned into not using easy ways to connect programs together. The Unix pipe mechanism-pipe B pipe C-is trivially easy to connect things together. Is that how programmers connect things together? No. They use APIs and they link them into the same memory space, which is appallingly difficult and isn't cross-language. If the language is in the same family it's OK-if they're imperative languages, that's fine. But suppose one is Prolog and the other is C. They have a completely different view of the world, how you handle memory. So you can't just link them together like that. You can't reuse things. - Joe Armstrong in Peter Seibel's Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming
I don't know C++ and its community very well, but here are my suspicions. I'd love for someone to confirm or dispel them.
* Relative to C is obviously that it provides a greater toolbox.
* Relative to Java, it gives more fine-grained control of the target platform, and programs have somewhat better startup speeds (though still often not very good, which I again suspect is because of large binary sizes).
* Relative to Python and Ruby, its static typing gives better guarantees as it allows less to fail at runtime.
* Relative to Go, Rust, D and ML languages, it is more well-established. Especially regarding GUI toolkit libraries.
I don't know how they can make this conclusion. I'm not even sure what it means when they say that "C++ is 27% slower". In the C benchmarking code, they hand roll a lot of the data structures whereas in the C++ code, they include either the standard library or boost. So it's not really a comparison of C vs C++ is it. There is nothing about C++ that would make that big of a difference.
It means the author mis-read "how many times slower, ..., compared to the fastest programs."
Compared to the fastest programs, not compared to the C programs.
Compared to C programs, and Ada programs, and C++ programs, and JavaScript programs, and Fortran programs... that were faster.