I promise never to use C/C++ for a new project | Hacker News Reader

I promise never to use C/C++ for a new project

flourish.org

18 pointsfrabcus11 comments

I can't avoid smiling when I see this. It is not that I don't have a love/hate relationship with C++ already or that I don't like Rust or Golang a lot but...

It gives me the impression we live all in our silos/caves and pretend reality is the same.

Working for an Enterprise Linux distributor that ships code for multiple architectures and support our code for a decade means Rust or Golang would fail the first round of questions: eg. Does it run on s390x?

Then I remember I am reading Hacker news and Macbooks are all x86_64 and software is rewritten from scratch every 2 months :-)

I bet somebody will bring up embedded/micro-controllers.

EDIT: grammar

"Does it run on s390x?"

Or IBM's i operating system[1] (formerly i5/OS, formerly OS/400), for that matter. The enterprise world is chock full of machines that run on this, but I'm not expecting a version of Rust or Go that runs on EBCDIC machines in the foreseeable future.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_i

The irony of a blog posting of holier than thou, about security, then posting direct to the page where people have commented with tags for js popups. secure your blog comments - amateur hour was earlier on this morning!

Just like lizard squad, it has been a fun week.

my favorite thing to do is just to press submit, why verify if the field is used at all?

Before a couple weeks ago, the last time I had used C++ was back in 1998, I think. I never enjoyed "C with classes" and I vowed to never touch it again. Last year, I attempted to put together a simple MNIST digit recognition program using plain old C. I gave up and did it in Fortran (working with matrices is SO easy!). Now, however, I've matured a little and realized that I really needed to get back into C++ and seriously use it. So I retaught myself the language using Stroustrup's Programming book (the one that has C++14) and his preferred methods (teaching the use of vectors early on is great!).

Now that I've approached the language in its C++14 mode and using good libraries such as Armadillo, I've come to the conclusion that all this talk about C++ being too low-level and too difficult is ridiculous. If you're not using libraries and programming in a higher level, you're not doing it right. I've been rewriting that digit recognition program and I've yet to declare a pointer or allocate any memory on my own. In fact, its so high-level that it almost looks like Matlab code.

I agree, C++11/14 is a game changer in regards to safety and ease of use. With C++14, new and delete actually are a code smell.

The biggest ease of use issue with C++ is now getting good modern libraries for doing common stuff.

Dare to commit to not using C or C++ for your next 8bit AVR project?

Is there a LLVM backend for AVR ? (not a snarky question)

There appears to be ongoing work for AVR support in both clang ( https://github.com/4ntoine/clang/ ) and llvm ( https://github.com/dylanmckay/avr-llvm ).

There is for gcc: https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/avr-gcc

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