Ken Thompson's criticism of C++ as incoherent, complex and garbage heap of ideas still resonates with me; C++98 was the last version I used for work although I've dabbled in 11/17/20 out of curiosity.
IMO, if c++/cfront didn't ride on the tails of c, I'm skeptical it would've seen widespread use, but then, that's its main identity which limited it in ways that C++ was not willing to change; It is highly irritating to spend as much time to sanitize the implementation with Coverity/Valgrind and the ilk when the compiler could've handled it.
With C++98, Bjarne's book on c++ internals could've give you good insight into what went on, but later it turned into a whole cottage industry of "effective, more effective, proficient, performant, c++" series of books -- so kiss goodbye to any notion of being able comprehend existing code that's not written by you (until llms arrived). I'm happy to have spent time to learn problem domain instead.
I'll still watch the documentary since it has some of my favorite folks (Kernighan, Stepanov).
> if c++/cfront didn't ride on the tails of c, I'm skeptical it would've seen widespread use
What launched C++ into success was Zortech C++. At the time, 90% of programming was done on MS-DOS. Cfront was nearly unusable on DOS, because:
1. agonizingly slow to compile
2. no support for near/far pointers, which was essential for non-trivial apps
Zortech C++ fixed those problems, and sold like wildfire. This provided critical mass for C++ to succeed. The traffic on comp.lang.c++ angled sharply upward. Borland saw our sales, and abandoned their OOP language product and did Turbo C++ instead. Microsoft saw Borland's success and then did their own C++.
We sold a lot of Zortech C++ compilers to Microsoft. They used it to develop COM.
I heard rumors that Microsoft was developing their own OOP C, called C*. I've never been able to confirm it, though.
Your perspective on this may be distorted due to your personal involvement. Do you believe MSVC++ or Turbo C++ would still have existed without Zortech C++ arriving first? Because if so then I don't think you can really take credit for C++ popularity on the PC.
> Do you believe MSVC++ or Turbo C++ would still have existed without Zortech C++ arriving first?
Nope. As I mentioned, Borland was working on their own OOP C language. ZTC++'s success caused them to abandon it and do Turbo C++. I know this because of my conversations with Eugene Wang. And Turbo C++'s success caused Microsoft to do MSVC++, which was quite late to the game.
Before C++, the newsgroup traffic on C++ and ObjC was about the same. The C++ traffic took off after ZTC++ was released.
Something that not many people consider. It is almost certain that C++ "saved" C by existing. Without C++ there would be an enormous pressure to add more features to C itself. One reason why C committee could get away without adding much over the years was that they could nod towards C++ and say "that's their job, not ours". And if later didn't exist who knows what kind of language C would become. Classes? Templates? Lambdas? We can only speculate.
I don't know if this is true. In the 80s there were many languages that were C with additional features or C preprocessors that added and experimented with features similar to cfront. You had OOPC (object-oriented pre-compiler), Objective-C, C*, Concurrent-C. People were experimenting in all kinds of ways by taking C and trying things out with it.
I think it is absolutely true, because adding features to an experimental language that has no tools or ecosystem surrounding it does nothing and people know that.
Niche experiments having features doesn't accomplish anything, but adding just one more feature to C seems plausible.
With C++ people could point people to another production ready language compatible with C that people could use, so there was somewhere they could do and an example of the feature working instead of someone promising silver bullets in theory.
Yeah, OPs claim feels disconnected from C’s identity. C stayed conservative because the areas where it excels (to this day) benefit from its “portable assembler” design history. A history with no C++ wouldn’t have changed that, instead another (either non-C extended or alternative C-adapted [Obj-C, for instance]) language would have taken the market C++ did; likely with a larger runway time due to the lack of interoperability/superset compilation.
It's why I've found Rust a joy - enough had happened in programming languages, that it was able to reinvent C++ with some of the best parts of the Haskell/ML/Scala family, some of the ergonomics of Python/nodejs, and bringing the borrow checker too.
C++ is this weird amalgam of like 7 different generations of languages.
But by far the worst part is the developer hostility behind the idea of UB. "Oh, this is not an error, it will compile, we will just secretly stab you in the back."
You can get good and avoid it, and there are tools to help you, but why is that at all a reasonable stance for the definition of a language?
Saying this about Rust and C++ is like saying the kitchen you just built is cleaner than the old kitchen you used for 50 years. Get back to me in another few years.
Now for Rust I don’t think it is going to change a lot. Because it is based on ML, it has the best foundations and all features are known. The question is more how much Haskell vs script/imperative do you want your language to be, and what’s the purpose of the language rather than we had the wrong paradigm and found a new better one. For Rust 99% of its features are known and most are already implemented.
Maybe things around the borrow checker, and await, but beyond that nothing as much as what C++ saw in its history. Even more when for instance you see the article from the guy doing Gleam where traits (impl) are not necessary, all you need is data and function to have the same functionality. Or how ML have been the main factor to most new languages or new features to existing languages.
The future is ML, with languages dedicated to specific use cases and niches. And also ML languages easily readable by AI.
Hilarious coming from the guy whose shitty Multics ripoff directly inspired "Worse is Better"
From the essay:
"Unix and C are the ultimate computer viruses.
A further benefit of the worse-is-better philosophy is that the programmer is conditioned to sacrifice some safety, convenience, and hassle to get good performance and modest resource use. Programs written using the New Jersey approach will work well both in small machines and large ones, and the code will be portable because it is written on top of a virus.
It is important to remember that the initial virus has to be basically good. If so, the viral spread is assured as long as it is portable. Once the virus has spread, there will be pressure to improve it, possibly by increasing its functionality closer to 90%, but users have already been conditioned to accept worse than the right thing. Therefore, the worse-is-better software first will gain acceptance, second will condition its users to expect less, and third will be improved to a point that is almost the right thing. In concrete terms, even though Lisp compilers in 1987 were about as good as C compilers, there are many more compiler experts who want to make C compilers better than want to make Lisp compilers better.
The good news is that in 1995 we will have a good operating system and programming language; the bad news is that they will be Unix and C++."
I highly respect the Ken Thompson and the rest of the old UNIX hands, but wouldn't they admit that the real world is messy and the best solutions in isolation don't always win?
Their creation C and UNIX won over the more advanced LISP and Smalltalk systems because they were simpler to implement. Even their own more advanced Plan 9 based OSs could not displace the more widespread unix-like systems.
It seems distribution and 'good enough' to rely on always wins. IMO, dynamic languages like Perl, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, PHP and the heavily marketed Java provided good enough high level facilities that have prevented people from reaching for Lisp and Smalltalk.
Looking at it through this lens, perhaps C++ was the vehicle for strapping some high level facilities on a widely adopted low level performant language that made it just good enough of a technology for wide adoption.
You think that LISP and Smalltalk aren't widely used is because they weren't easy to implement in the late 1980's? There have been many languages that have risen to prominence in the 40 years since, yet LISP and Smalltalk remain niche languages.
My opinion is that Lisp and Smalltalk are too pure and abstract. C is heavily tied to the real world of computing and can be easier to grasp for beginner. But try to explain variable bindings (instead of assignment) or message passing (instead of function calls) to a beginner in programming. It’s not that they’re hard to explain or understand, they’re just hard to be completely grasped without a foundation in computer science. They’re too alien.
> kiss goodbye to any notion of being able comprehend existing code that's not written by you (until llms arrived).
In my experience it takes a while (<=3 months) for folks to become proficient when they see an alien dialect of c++. That may sound totally unacceptable to you (fair). Cpp is also a “big tent” language in that it is genuinely multi-paradigm.
I think LLM’s might help, but sometime they hurt too (confidently/persuasively wrong analyses). The gain is large for small/trivial contributions. For changes that require genuine understanding, I’m not sure (large error bars personally as to whether the sign is even positive).
Since I've been working in C++ a lot recently I decided to watch the video as I waited for a build to complete. So the length is about right. And fortunately, the video is a delight!
So happy to see Andrei Alexandrescu was included in this documentary. His book on modern C++ design was a mind opener at the time I read it. Maybe still is today. Anybody else read it?
It still amuses me, but Andrei's books were the "last straw" that pushed me away from C++ for many years. Great books, truly, and they helped cement the notion that I wanted to move on to a different language. (Go, at the time.)
I read it recently. I liked a few of the chapters especially how policy classes fix some issues with OO design. I do recommend asking an AI chatbot to summarize each chapter and say what the modern equivalent is since some of the idioms have improved. I think one whole section was obsoleted through the use of std::variant and std::visit.
Yes, I feel the same way. I met Andrei once on a Meetup in Munich, basically telling him that he taught me how to think which led to a somewhat awkward conversion. Fun times nonetheless :-)
It also caused developers to produce template-heavy code that took minutes to compile. We used to joke that these developers were "bitten by Alexandrescu".
But it was indeed a nice book that really made stataic polymorphism popular. Before that, most books focused on building object hierarchies with virtual functions, etc.
Personal opinion: C++ is the most elegant language I have used (for about 15 years). If you are the 'systemizer' type and like to have an extremely precise mental model of the thing you write down to the last bit, nothing beats C++. I acknowledge the limitations and uncertainties that come from compilers etc, but still
I very much prefer to work in Rust but it does force you to design things in an counter-intuitive way in certain situations (linked lists for the canonical example). Specially for lower level software I find C or C++ to allow for much more flexibility and thus the most straightforward design possible.
An elegant language is one that achieves a lot with very little. Forth and Scheme are elegant languages. You're free to like working in C++, and you can sure achieve a lot with it, but I don't think it's controversial to say that it does not do so with very little.
Makes sense. This appears to be also a symptom of whatever you work on most (or start with), your brain starts to absorb that into its way of thinking.
C++ needs to die. I get so many people are invested in it and so much code is written in it. I used to be a fan and it's still my main job. But, in 2026 with LLMs able to find all the exploits, and with more and more adversarials, we need a language that is opt-out of safety, not C++ which is opt-in + super vigilance to get safety. It doesn't work and decades of experience proves it.
C++ was a superb language for its time. There was nothing faster with as-powerful abstractions. It showed how far you can change a language too, with C++11 being a massively better language with shared_ptr and company.
It took in almost every idea, and the battlefield showed us which do work and which don't. We get to keep RAII, move vs copy, smart pointers, placement-new, and generics. We get to drop auto_ptr, copy-by-default, its specific exceptions implementation (fight me), multiple virtual inheritance, and templates as full code substitution.
In my opinion the battles have played out, and Rust is the best sum-up of what worked (it even inherited the compile times! Lucky us!)
It's surprising that C++'s development trend continues.
When a game or program is made with C++, it's usually nice because performance is mostly guaranteed. But if someone told me to write C++ myself, I'd cry. There's too much to memorize, and the standards are too varied. When I go to a project site for maintenance and it's a C++ project, I instantly lose energy — because it's just too difficult.
I'd be happy if someone else wrote it, but it's not a language I want to write myself
Personally I don't find programming with C++ that hard. The downside is it needs a brain warm-up, and this is per project, but once that flywheel is spinning, I find it almost effortless to write code.
I have to go through the same warm-up more or less for any language I work with, so it's not that different than writing Python, Go or Java for me.
It may not be an abstraction of a real machine. But the C abstract machine is very close to the foundational idea of how a computer work. And it’s quite easy to bootstrap.
Importantly my work involves me often being able to look at C and think about the assembly and back and I regularly work on ESP32, ch42(riscv) and atmega avr8.
I couldn't do that with mciropython on any platform.
I find C++ not hard at all when working with familiar idioms, restrictions and toolings (familiar to me). But it's hard jumping into new codebases and adjusting yourself to new patterns. Recently I did a lot of programming using C++23 Modules and it was a breeze.
There's basically dozens of very nice languages inside C++. That can be a blessing or a curse.
I'm anxious for Herb Sutter's CPP2/CPPFront to become a standard.
What type of project actually uses C++ 23 modules in real life? What kind of toolchain enables that? When I worked on Chromium, they were indefinitely in the "maybe in 5-10 years the tooling will be ready" camp.
The tooling people have - as of about a year ago said they are ready. Now everyone who considers themselves early adopters is using then. Most are waiting for the early adopters to figure out what the best practices are so we don't make a mess
There are so many standards and idioms that it gets confusing. There are still legacy codebases out there — some codebase still use C++98 as their standard, others use C++11... And with Unreal Engine, the modern C++ standard is C++14, right? There are things like smart pointers, but some places don't even use them. I feel like there are just too many features. When I saw template metaprogramming — that new feature — I realized I have no talent for C++.
I have developed things with C++98, C++11 and C++14. Every of these standards are so vast, so remembering everything (even in a single standard) is not possible. Instead of knowing everything, I first fix the standard I want or need to work with.
Then I design the thing I want to build. I always design what I want to build beforehand. This takes a couple of iterations from high level to low-ish level. That last design becomes a bit language dependent. Then I select some of the core tools that I'm going to use (which kind of pointers, classes or structs, etc.)
With that design in mind, I go "library shopping" both for file formats (if any) or other stuff like vectors, etc.
Armed with the reference docs of these, I write my code with the toolbelt I have built for the project.
Some things are hard, but they are not impossible. I find thinking like compiler helps a lot.
This is true of any language. Python with flask vs django, with/without type hints. JavaScript with anhular and vue.
The varying standards are no different to major python versions or go versions - arguably there’s even less between most versions than there is in your average go release.
The differences in apps and frameworks don’t matter for day to day - std::string, Unreal’s FString and QT’s QString all are similar enough that 99.9% of the time.
Metaprogramming is one of those things; you either write it or you don’t. Knowing some basics is required but the vast majority of people use a handful of pre existing things without understanding the nuances of how it works under the hood.
Is it? Java has changed a lot, but in such a way that it's still easy to mentally map new features to the old ones, provided you have understood the core language. IDEs can even convert your code from old to new and back.
> When I saw template metaprogramming — that new feature — I realized I have no talent for C++.
It's not a new feature. And tbh, compared to Typescript, C++ templates are tame ;)
(but yeah, deciding when to stop digging into the template metaprogramming rabbit hole requires some common sense and sanity, too much template complexity is almost never worth the hassle)
When I went on a business trip for screen golf program project back then, it was UE4(CPP14), By your introduction UE5 onward, it's 20. I've updated my knowledge.
The difference, if you split hairs, that the brain warm-up takes a bit longer. Maybe a couple of hours, or a day at most.
Otherwise it's not different for me. I don't feel different while writing with any other language. I guess the main reason is I always think like the computer first and translate that thinking to the programming language at hand.
For games, C++ becomes a much simpler language since game code bases usually ignore the C++ stdlib (at least mostly, and for good reasons, e.g. see [0]). And without the stdlib C++ is actually kinda-sorta okay-ish.
Related, the main problem with the C++ ecosystem is that everybody carves out their own language subset, so it's not one ecosystem but many ecosystems with contradicting styles and language/stdlib subsets. This makes code reuse via libraries much harder than it should be.
I fully agree. In my personal project, I ended up using the STL to get off the ground, but in the end I replaced pretty much everything with custom-written code.
Once you get rid of the STL, compile times get so much better. With modern c++23 features, templates actually become really convenient to write, and at the core there is a really useful and pleasant to use language.
I try to avoid c++ libraries and instead rely on c-style APIs. Usually the c++ style libraries force you into using the STL, which comes with a heavy tax on compile times, without much benefit in comfort of use.
I echo the parent commenter - the STL has a massive negative impact on compile times. And for what? The STL is not even fast. The way the standards are written, std::unordered_map has to be implemented as a tree rather than a flat open-addressing hashtable, which would've been far superior due to cache locality.
For my own project I rolled my own string, string_view, map, set, optional, variant, and vector. Only took maybe a day. And that day has paid dividends, as my clean debug builds literally take 3 seconds now.
Rewriting at least std::vector was a standard way to prep for a Google interview. And std::map if you wanted bonus points or a level up. Also, really interesting to do.
On the contrary. You can focus exactly on the features the higher level game code needs. The C++ stdlib is (for the most part) poorly designed, usually poorly implemented, the main reason for slow build times, and its complexity explodes because it needs to consider all edge cases that most code bases don't ever trigger.
A specialized dynamic array class in a few hundred lines (at most!) and with just the required features is much more useful than the 20kloc monster that's pulled in with `#include <vector>` and which doesn't even do bounds checking in the 'idiomatic' usage.
Saying it doesn't even do bounds checking (in release builds) is to miss one of the major points of C++ - not paying for what you don't need. It's not a mistake, it's a feature.
You complain about it not being suitable for game development in one comment but then expect bounds checking in release builds? You're sitting in multiple lanes at the same time.
NIH implementations are usually grossly inferior because as it turns out, it's quite hard to get it right and those edge-cases aren't important until you start getting bitten by them when you'd rather be shipping features.
Bounds checking overhead is negligible for all but the absolutely hottest code paths (fwiw we shipped active asserts, including bounds checking asserts in all the PC games I was involved with - carefully monitoring the overhead of course).
The main reason to not use the stdlib isn't so much about squeezing out the last bit of performance, but about control of what actually happens under the hood (and also compilation times). The overall runtime cost of all those active asserts (not just the range checks, everything) was somewhere in the 2..3% range, which is fine when budgeted for upfront.
Those asserts probably saved a lot of development costs and increased the robustness of the software, which is worth a lot more than a few percent on a benchmark.
I personally am more conservative on those things. I'll pick the fastest thing that is reliable.
Are we talking about games or medical devices here? I expect different things from them. If a medical device needs to turn off bounds checking to get results I'm concerned enough to not want to let anyone use it. If a game can get a slight performance improvement I'm all for it, who cares if it crashes, it is just a game.
We can all agree it's not medical systems, but audio DSP and game dev both end up rewriting a lot of STL stuff to suit their needs, and often using a restricted subset of modern C++ features for similar reasons.
That isn't some arbitrary choice, but pretty much where everyone continually ends up when solving real-time problems using C++. Whether those be games or not.
You can prevent more than enough crashes with enough testing to make gamers happy. Even if you prove there is not out of bounds error I still want a medical device to check
The point is that STL does make you pay for stuff you don't need. In complexity and compile times. There's reasons Jai is being developed, and they're not all that Jonathon Blow is weird. As much as C++ owns the game industry right now, it has observable deficits as a great game programming language.
Yes I don't disagree that sometimes a specific container or a data structure is great for the problem. Problem is that most of the game code and related code (so tooling,editor, auxiliary engine code) does need a typical STL type functionality and then when the org has "omg no STL" blanket rule someone ends up implementing STL and that's almost always worse than the STL that ships with the tool chain. Even worse..it'll be missing features and data structures and then people have to write sub-optimal code to work around it's limitations.
Top tier game orgs are often large enough to have good people write their own library with the correct compromises. They also tend to need micro performance improvements enough to be worth it.
Yeah, EA open sourced their STL, although now that C++23 is supported (aside from on MSVC? Still not flat_map there?!?) there is some replication in the STL.
Not uncommon for audio companies to also write their own containers and internal STL for ex. plugins as well.
I find it hard to agree that the stdlib is poorly designed and implemented. In my entire career it has pretty much worked entirely to spec.
Yes, it can exhibit non-optimal performance, and in some specific cases (regex's especially), extremely poor performance, but that's not the same as being poorly designed and implemented, especially given the breadth of the thing.
C++ stdlib was barely acceptable in the 1990s but is heavily outdated today and suffers from deeply frustrating design flaws.
The ABI Nightmare - The C++ committee has this extraordinarily weird and strict rule: never break the Application Binary Interface (ABI). If a better algorithm or memory layout is discovered, the standard library cannot adopt it because doing so would change object layouts and break existing binaries. The worst part is that this ABI is never defined, so you always HEAVILY pay for what you DON'T use.
std::regex - the Programming Language Joke of the millennium. Even an interpreted language regex engine runs faster.
std::map, std::unordered_map - outdated, badly-designed and slow crap that is beaten even by high-school coders writing map data-structures.
No bounds checking. And Undefined Behavior by Default for operators like std::vector::operator[]
std::iostream - bloated, expensive design, std::vector<bool> - another joke.
No deprecation strategy. There are FOUR callable wrappers. At-least, have the courage to say @DEPRECATED.
No Standard Networking.
Missing System Utilities - nothing for process management, standard cryptography, or basic command-line argument parsing, etc.
To be honest, this is just the common complaints - if you run through all the stdlib features, there are dozens of severe problems. Which all the smart people know about, but are forbidden to fix - because of ABI!
The STL is not good if you want performance or predictable behavior. The issue is in the specification and the requirements placed on certain algorithms and data structures. It’s easy to beat unordered_map for example with an open addressing hash map, small vector optimization can’t be implemented in vector due to standard requirements, etc.
some of the STL is easy to improve on. For example, std::unordered_map performs poorly due to pointer stability requirements in the standard. Most performance sensitive C++ codebases will use something like abseil's hash maps instead.
Just a heads-up: if you're already using boost, boost::unordered now has open addressing containers (unordered_flat_map and unordered_flat_map) and they are among the fastest.
So, a few things (aside from the whole nomenclature argument already in another reply)
1. Stepanov's generic programming is a good idea. Every language you've seen with "generics" that's his idea, to the extent "The STL" is generic programming, everybody agreed it's a good idea.
2. But the STL is very old now, so while the idea is good, this is one of the oldest (Stepanov had tried this in other languages before C++) implementations and so other implementations are often better, because they've learned from experience
3. As well as pretty good generic algorithms, the STL also provides a lot of container types (what Rust would call collection types) and these vary not between "excellent" and "mediocre" but between "mediocre" and "inexplicably terrifying". The most charitable explanation is that they're just intended for teaching. If you teach DS&A to a Computer Science class you want the Extrusive Doubly Linked List to teach in class. If you write software you almost certainly never need this type, but it's front an centre in the C++ STL.
There's a single "I guess I would use this" container type, std::vector. It has an insane special case for bool, because WG21 are idiots, but it's otherwise a good enough growable array type and it's not worth building your own instead given the constraints.
Everything else is silly, or bad, or both. std::unordered_map feels like a hash table I made in class in the mid 1990s, but it's actually the provided standard hash table container in C++ 11 onwards. std::list is just that extrusive linked list for some insane reason. The Microsoft standard library maintainer STL could not offer me any justification for what std::deque is actually supposed to be for.
I would argue that even the basic concept behind STL is misguided. The rationale I often see is "you only need N algorithms for M container type, instead of N*M". This ignores the fact that algorithms and data structures are not independent of each other, and also that most of the time these days you're operating on vectors, so M ~= 1.
Case in point: list::sort. You don't want to try running quicksort on a linked list. Or remove_if: great we've abstracted the difficult task of removing things without erasing them, except we can't do it on maps. (C++20 seems to add an erase_if, apparently admitting that the two-step remove/erase is silly).
Then there's the fact that C++ iterators are basically pointers into the data structure, where for vectors (your common case) you'd do much better with index/container pairs, both for stability and bounds checking.
AFAIK, std::map is also OK for what it is: an ordered, node-based (tree) map. These are (almost) always slower than hash tables. Of course, std::unordered_map, the std hash table, sucks because of unforced errors. For that, there is boost::unordered_flat_map.
> There's a single "I guess I would use this" container type, std::vector.
About that one... I would claim that in a majority of cases where an std::vector is used, what the author really wanted was a similar type, but whose size and capacity are fixed on construction and never change. The standard C++ library does not offer such a type - so people use vector because it's handy.
Agree with your takes on most of the containers. I also dislike how optionals are never used with containers as they were standardized later (and even then, problematically w.r.t. references). Thus, for example, if I lookup an object in a map of T's, the result should IMNSHO be an optional reference to a T.
std::array requires the size to be set at compile-time, while I was talking about arrays whose size is determined at construction-time. Of course std::array is also quite the useful class :-)
It has some very useful principles, but also some super-annoying gaffes and mis-design aspects. One example: Allocators. What a mess! Or the fact that if a map lookup fails, an exception is thrown. I can't count the times I've had some app just bail out on me with an at() exception, because the author neglected to handle it (and the map/unordered map interface did not force them to). That does not detract from Stepanov's important work.
The kind of programmer who don't check (or think through so that they can't fail) their map lookups is also the kind of programmer who don't bother with const. What a non-const unchecked map lookup gives you is a default-constructed value that has just been inserted for the only reason that operator[] returns a reference, which must "point" to something. That's bad and can be confusing, but it doesn't crash.
I see that problem much more often than crashes due to unchecked map lookups in production, which are very rare for me. Less than once a year.
Your citation refers to the register keyword and trigraphs, among other language features -- the author seems to have forgotten his own point, among a number of other inconsistencies and contradictions, and at times seems to go out of his way to come across as a jerk, e.g., "This is what fifteen years of standards work on an eight-letter keyword looks like".
People love to rag on the standards committee. I was on X3J11, the C Language Standards Committee, in 1989 ... in fact, due to alphabetical order I was the first person on the planet to vote to approve the C language standard -- the one that first standardized register and trigraphs. Standards work is hard and everyone hates you for it.
Grossly exaggerated or misunderstood in many cases.
Some of their arguments are just flat-out wrong.
I mean, why are they blaming the standard library for inherent properties of linked lists? Yeah, you don't want to use them without good reason. That's just called picking the right data structure for the job, not a flaw with the standard library.
Some of the other choices were tradeoffs between performance and usability. The standard maps have stable iterators, whereas third-party implementations almost never do because you can write faster implementations if you're willing to live without those guarantees. Was it the right choice in hindsight? Maybe, maybe not.
I'd personally like to see a namespaced versioned standard library but like that's ever going to happen
As I understood the article, the main critique is that the stdlib has no concept of deprecation and breaking backward compatibility. E.g. the C++ committee is quick to add badly designed features to the stdlib but then can't roll them back when people actually realize that those new features are useless for most real-world code.
I'm not sure this is a winnable game for programming languages.
- Keep a small stdlib, like JavaScript (especially earlier JavaScript): everyone complains about missing features, warring communities form around jQuery promises vs. Promises/A+ vs. callbacks, supply chain attacks, left-pad/is-even dependencies, etc.
- Grow a big stdlib while keeping backward compatibility, like C++: lots of cruft left around that must never be used, sitting next to newer stuff with similar names. People complain about the bloat.
- Grow a big stdlib and then break backward compatibility, like Python 2 -> 3: everyone is sad, the ecosystem churns for years.
I admit there are probably better and worse versions of each strategy, e.g., it seems to me like JavaScript's slow-but-steady accretion of primitives over time has gone OK, and it seems like apart from Python 2 -> 3 some of the PEPs I see for deprecations and replacements are reasonable. But no language has ever hit on a strategy that everyone loves, as far as I can tell.
Badly designed things get replaced. For example unique_ptr replaced auto_ptr. I'm not sure if the language standard actually supports the term "deprecation" though.
Edit: Also not sure what can possibly be downvoted here.
ISO/IEC 14882 contains many uses of the word "deprecation", including all the sections of Appendix D that explicitly lists all of the deprecated and removed features of the language and library.
You're right that C++ has a lot of features. But like mentioned elsewhere most projects define their own conventions and the subset of features that they use.
Also the nice thing about having a large set of features is that C,++ allows you to write very nice abstractions (or not) at both very low or at very high level. In other words you can be very low level with online ASM and bit operations and bit and direct memory manipulation or very high level almost like a script language. Whatever the problem domain needs C++ has got you covered.
One of my hobbies is rummaging around thrift stores appreciating tacky things from bygone eras, sifting through ill-conceived modern junk, and delighting in simple, solid tools where I can find them.
I don't really understand this perspective. You don't need to memorize anything to learn a new programming language. You choose a medium-sized project you've already done in another language, start with "Hello world," and add one line of code at a time until the project is done. When there's something you need that you don't know how to do, you look it up.
You'll end up with a strong understanding of the subset of the language that's actually useful for the thing you want to build.
You can be pretty productive even with 70% of the language :) It is a common misconception that C++ is suitable only for game engines and similar domains. It is perfectly fine for applications domain as well.
As a side note, regarding your profile info, unless you are based in North Korea, please at least add one 0 to your rate. You'll get more long-term and high-quality clientele.
> You can be pretty productive even with 70% of the language
Or even far less than that. I like to use it as C with lambdas and namespaces. Sprinkle in metaprogramming as needed. Even just not having to remember to call cleanup code thanks to dtors would alone be enough to sell me on it.
Honestly, I don't expect to find clients here. Fundamentally, you have to trust me to give me work. The amount of money doesn't really matter much to me.
> But if someone told me to write C++ myself, I'd cry. There's too much to memorize, and the standards are too varied
If someone tells you to write a web app, do you also cry? Surely there's more JavaScript frameworks than subsets of C++ at this point, no? Do you also go memorize all of them? Or do you just quickly pick one, and then only learn that one, and forget the rest exist? Because that's kinda how you approach C++. You pick a subset (like, say, just modern C++, only caring about C++17 & later or whatever), and just use that. And move on with your life. There's absolutely no reason to learn how std::auto_ptr works because it's dead in the same way you aren't learning how PHP & CGI works if you're making a modern web app. They're dead relics of the past that you can just pretend don't exist.
(Safe) Rust is a lot better about the "Pit of Success" design than C++
There are fundamental technical choices to deliver that, but also ergonomic things like notice Rust's []::sort is a stable sort, whereas C++ std::sort is an unstable sort. If you don't know about sort stability in Rust what you wrote works and in C++ you get a nasty surprise.
C++ has std::sort() and std::stable_sort(). You should write what you mean, and you should know and understand your tools. Blaming the tool for your ignorance marks you as significantly less than an artisan.
Sort specifically is kind of a weird example, but C++ is full of awful naming.
std::map (which is not a hash map, which is what most people would expect), std::move (which doesn't move), std::vector (which is not a vector), and std::vector<bool> (which is not even a std::vector).
Sure, both languages offer both generic comparison sorts†. But the defaults matter and as always in C++ the defaults are wrong, here it's reflected in naming.
That's not actionable information, except in the sense that the correct action is "don't use C++". Because sure, I know about sort stability, and I know about pointer provenance, and about memory ordering, but there might be any number of things I do not know and unfortunately in C++ "you should know and understand" absolutely everything at all times, which is not viable.
† The C++ standard library sorts are both much slower than in Rust, but hey, they're also both less safe so you're really getting the worst of both worlds
> Sure, both languages offer both generic comparison sorts†. But the defaults matter and as always in C++ the defaults are wrong, here it's reflected in naming.
Why, exactly, is the c++ std::sort "wrong"? There are tradeoffs both ways. You happen to prefer stable sorting to speed, but that is a preference not an objective fact.
It's silently an unstable sort, which is surprising, and then to add insult to injury it's also slower. Yeah, I know, the C++ unstable sort is so slow it's slower than Rust's stable sort.
YMMV for input types, sizes etc but generally that's what the numbers look like and though it's not universal it's actually quite common. "I bet the C++ is faster" is the wrong instinct, sometimes by a large margin.
Not really, despite all its warts, it is exactly because of them that many reach out to C++.
Many of us don't like C, it was already too little and too unsafe, when the first C++ compilers started to hit the market in early 1990's, hence why all desktop OSes moved into C++ for their frameworks.
The return to C has caused by the rise of FOSS, UNIX winning the server room, and early GNU coding standards to use only C as main compiled language.
Additionally as many other programming language ecosystems have discovered, it is easy to beat C++ in version 1.0, and eventually all of them grow to get the complexity of their own.
I reach for C++, because the language runtimes, compiler tooling, and GPGPU frameworks I care about are partially written in C++, and I am not in the place to be writing new ecosystems myself.
I work maintaining the toolchain and language runtimes for a commercial safety-certified embedded operating system. I am deeply familiar with C and C++ because I live it and breathe it every day and have done so for over 40 years.
Most of our customers use C, probably for historic reasons but also because it is much much easier to reason about and that becomes very important when auditing for functional safety certification. If someone's life depends on your software, you really want to be able to reason about its correctness because orange jumpsuits enhance no one's complexion.
Many of customers are now using C++. From the problems they have reported, well, they just shouldn't. It's not that it is a bad language (it isn't) or that it is inherently unsafe (it really isn't: exceptions are safer than propagating return values as long as you use them in exception conditions, because not catching one will return you to a designed safe state very quickly, and RAII is the best thing since sliced cheese). It's that cutting and pasting from Stack Overflow, and now vibe coding, makes for massive codebases that are next to impossible to reason about. I now see a lot of problems from customers where my first reaction is "don't write code like that" and "you can write bad JavaScript code in any language, can't you?". While it butters my bread and I enjoy the language, I really recommend against using C++ for safety-certified embedded software. Stick to C.
If only C actually had fat pointers as Dennis Ritchie, one of the authors, proposed to WG14.
It is quite relevant to note that the C authors, were keen to explore Alef as alternative on Plan 9, and based on the learnings reduced C's role on Inferno, and eventually took part in Go's design.
Even though they were not keen into using C++ (Plan 9 doesn't even support it), they were also aware C wasn't to be used for everything.
The ecosystem isn't fine - just to get a project going requires picking a non-trivial set of tools and approaches, none of which the C++ standard enforces or guides to.
For example, will you manage dependencies via packages? If so, with what? What will you use for building your project? The list goes on and on.
- new features overlapping old features from previous standards without replacing them or deprecating them (function::copyable_function vs std::function, std::less<> key for transparent lookup in maps)
- new features not usable by the layman (coroutines ...)
- Cryptic syntax (reflection...)
- Stuff you are told not to use because of performance reason and that cant be fixed because of ABI (regex)
- Compile errors that are 1km long (no, concepts are not helping here, the 'nicer' message is still buried into a hot pile of template instantiation callstack).
I wonder how many programming languages would be able to devoid of all or some of these problems when they are 40 years old.
It's easy to compare new and old languages, and saying older languages are wrinkly. Let's see how other shiny programming languages look like when they are 40 years old.
I personally find the lack of native package management in C++ as a blessing. Go, Python, Rust has it, and this always causes pulling in infinite number of packages for any trivial operation.
sudo-rs was pulling in 1M+ LOC as its dependency chain at one point. I believe they removed the biggest offenders, but I didn't check it recently.
>There's too much to memorize, and the standards are too varied. When I go to a project site for maintenance and it's a C++ project, I instantly lose energy — because it's just too difficult.
If you'd already been using it for 10+ years you wouldn't feel that way, because you'd already have memorized a lot of it.
You don't have to use them. There's a handful of nice to haves in modern releases but its totally fine and sane to just ignore whatever the committee is distracted by at the moment.
Hell, if you wait long enough, they'll just deprecate it before you can care to bother.
And that's the usual fallacy (just ignore the bad stuff).
But if you work with C++ in professional context, you will encounter it somewhere (library, teamate's PR, legacy code, LLM output, book / blog / conference ...). |
You actually need to know the bad stuff to be able to judge it and discard it.
Im talking about your own personal coding. You dont have to use the new things. You dont have to know them to decide to discard them. In fact, the criteria to discard something is to not know it. You generally shouldn't be using things you dont know anyway.
The fact that other people use things you do not know is not a reason to stress out about the dumb pace and direction c++ is moving in. It is possible to enjoy a life free from fomo about the c++ standards goalposts.
I had an idea for a special reminder app I wanted for myself. It's complicated enough that it comes to 9,000+ lines of code. I wanted to write it using the C++ UI library wxWidgets, because I like that wxWidgets uses native widgets, and is cross-platform, and that it's easy to make an app look nice. And that it doesn't use tons of memory.
There's a wxPython library, but I didn't want my UI to be limited due to whatever gaps may exist in that wrapper.
So I had AI write it in C++. Took about a day for me to get it done. It's perfectly solid. It did hit a couple of memory errors when I first used it, but I could give the AI MacOS crash report and the AI fixed the bugs easily, with no other involvement from me. (I compiled in a debug-friendly mode; no downside to that because it was just for me and was plenty fast enough.)
25 years or so ago, I was a fairly good C++ programmer. Haven't touched it since. And that includes this application, which was completely AI-written.
Hey I'm curious on how your reminder app works and to what effects, if you're willing to share. I'm on iteration 3 already of my reminder app, also vibe coded, and it helps me a lot. My first one was inspired on Remind [0].
Many browser rendering engines are built in C++, so C++ is parsing the HTML. My general point is that many web/internet techs that web devs interact with have C++ one abstraction level below for actual implementation.
I love a free documentary about something that I'm passionate about. So many thanks.
However, I'm a my own kind of weird. I cannot watch a documentary that's made out of people saying short sentences. I get that it's made to 'have them tell the story', but I need a narrator to tell me what to think because I get distracted.
I‘m out of the loop: we‘ve had Python, Clojure and possibly something else recently. Is that a series by the same people working through several languages? Is it happenstance? Is it a trend, and every programming language is now scrambling to get their own video documentary?
That‘s cool, since it establishes a brand. If one was done well, the others probably are, too, so even if it‘s not your language of choice, it will be interesting.
Romero was a prolific programmer himself back in the day. He's become more known as a designer because Carmack took over as the main engine programmer at id, but Romero was still writing tooling and editors, in addition to doing the level design.
I obviously don’t know them personally, but what I get from this old school generation that have been a pillar of computer science and, why not, modern human history, is just a tiny little bit more humbleness than “influential” people nowadays.
They may be humble in their older age but the good majority of people on the list were known for anything but their humbleness back when C++ was a much more dominant language.
My only problem with C++ is that it’s too verbose. my eyes need to parse huuge chunks of things when I just want some convenient syntax for it. otherwise the idioms are pretty universal for most programming languages nowadays.
Interesting, I don't find modern C++ verbose at all. 'auto', range-based for-loops and structured bindings did a great job at reducing the verbosity of C++98.
On top of that, C++ allows to design very concise APIs. (One of my favorite examples is sol2: https://github.com/ThePhd/sol2).
Library code involving templates, on the other hand, can be pretty complex and hard to read. Concepts and other C++20 features (like [[no_unique_address]]) are certainly an improvement, but only new projects with no backwards compatibility requirements can actually use them (unconditionally).
C++ is quite amenable to making things less verbose. For example: Instead of a standard library algorithm taking a pair of iterators, you could have a function taking a container and calling the other function with its start() and end(). And then, with newer versions of the language, you can use a ranges-based function. There are lots of such syntactic hacks, from `using` through typed literals all the way to preprocessor macros (which we want to avoid, but are still there).
That's how you emulate language features that aren't there originally. I've "impelemented" a static code block, like in Java:
C++ is one of the languages less suited to the strengths of coding agents.
The language which still supports C-style pointers, arbitrary datatype conversions, and inherits architecture-specific undefined behavior gives you too many ways to fail at solving a problem.
As a programmer, I love coding in C++ because I know what I'm doing. I'd hate reviewing C++ code though.
Just speculation, but I think we would expect a language to grow if AI is effective with it. C++ has a lot of training data. Most large software projects are written in C++: web browsers, compilers, 3D renderers, game engines, UI toolkits, etc.
AI is also probably more effective with statically typed languages since the compiler catches a wider range of errors.
A few reasons:
1. Header files make C++ verbose. Header files are well within LLM's ability
2. LLMs can handle setting up cmake for you
3. C++ is very well documented relative to (most) newer languages
4. LLMs can port modern features like websockets and build API wrappers easily, reducing the disadvantage against web (since most documentation is for JS/python/go)
Coding languages have been developing for speed of (manual) writing - akin to how human languages did with modern alphabets. Now that writing is a lot easier, languages will likely evolve towards a focus on execution (or in the case of human languages, speed of reading and precision of understanding)
All of those seem like barriers that make C++ unappealing in general, but you're deciding to overcome the barriers using an LLM and seeing that as a strength somehow?
Reddit's r/cpp has always had some level of "My First X" posts where somebody goes from their first C++ lesson to being confident they've written the "World's Best X" in about a week. The AI slop made this much worse because now the author has been told by ChatGPT or whatever that they're a genius.
All the popular PLs have this problem to some extent.
What a lineup of contributors—Stroustrup, Stepanov, Kernighan, Lattner, and more in one film. Forty years from 'C with Classes' to the fastest-growing of the top four languages is a remarkable arc, and it's nice to see the people behind it get their due. Adding this to the weekend watchlist. Thanks for sharing, Herb!
Herb's blog post links to the SlashData Developer Nation Survey, so presumably that's what the claim is based on. The company has a methodology page here [1], and it looks like the Developer Nation panel [2] is one of the sources used by that company.
IMO, if c++/cfront didn't ride on the tails of c, I'm skeptical it would've seen widespread use, but then, that's its main identity which limited it in ways that C++ was not willing to change; It is highly irritating to spend as much time to sanitize the implementation with Coverity/Valgrind and the ilk when the compiler could've handled it.
With C++98, Bjarne's book on c++ internals could've give you good insight into what went on, but later it turned into a whole cottage industry of "effective, more effective, proficient, performant, c++" series of books -- so kiss goodbye to any notion of being able comprehend existing code that's not written by you (until llms arrived). I'm happy to have spent time to learn problem domain instead.
I'll still watch the documentary since it has some of my favorite folks (Kernighan, Stepanov).
What launched C++ into success was Zortech C++. At the time, 90% of programming was done on MS-DOS. Cfront was nearly unusable on DOS, because:
1. agonizingly slow to compile
2. no support for near/far pointers, which was essential for non-trivial apps
Zortech C++ fixed those problems, and sold like wildfire. This provided critical mass for C++ to succeed. The traffic on comp.lang.c++ angled sharply upward. Borland saw our sales, and abandoned their OOP language product and did Turbo C++ instead. Microsoft saw Borland's success and then did their own C++.
We sold a lot of Zortech C++ compilers to Microsoft. They used it to develop COM.
I heard rumors that Microsoft was developing their own OOP C, called C*. I've never been able to confirm it, though.
Nope. As I mentioned, Borland was working on their own OOP C language. ZTC++'s success caused them to abandon it and do Turbo C++. I know this because of my conversations with Eugene Wang. And Turbo C++'s success caused Microsoft to do MSVC++, which was quite late to the game.
Before C++, the newsgroup traffic on C++ and ObjC was about the same. The C++ traffic took off after ZTC++ was released.
1. looking at newsgroup programming language traffic over time
2. looking at the release dates of Zortech C++, Turbo C++, and MSVC++
3. looking at the programming magazines of the time and what language/compiler they used
4. looking at the programming magazines at the time and seeing they were all about programming on the PC, not mainframes, and not Unix.
Niche experiments having features doesn't accomplish anything, but adding just one more feature to C seems plausible.
With C++ people could point people to another production ready language compatible with C that people could use, so there was somewhere they could do and an example of the feature working instead of someone promising silver bullets in theory.
I thought it would be a couple months to add C++ to my C compiler. 10 years later...
Perhaps. But in the 80's, C was the most practical language to use on the PC, by far. And porting C code to other platforms was easy.
It's why I've found Rust a joy - enough had happened in programming languages, that it was able to reinvent C++ with some of the best parts of the Haskell/ML/Scala family, some of the ergonomics of Python/nodejs, and bringing the borrow checker too.
C++ is this weird amalgam of like 7 different generations of languages.
But by far the worst part is the developer hostility behind the idea of UB. "Oh, this is not an error, it will compile, we will just secretly stab you in the back."
You can get good and avoid it, and there are tools to help you, but why is that at all a reasonable stance for the definition of a language?
Now for Rust I don’t think it is going to change a lot. Because it is based on ML, it has the best foundations and all features are known. The question is more how much Haskell vs script/imperative do you want your language to be, and what’s the purpose of the language rather than we had the wrong paradigm and found a new better one. For Rust 99% of its features are known and most are already implemented.
Maybe things around the borrow checker, and await, but beyond that nothing as much as what C++ saw in its history. Even more when for instance you see the article from the guy doing Gleam where traits (impl) are not necessary, all you need is data and function to have the same functionality. Or how ML have been the main factor to most new languages or new features to existing languages.
The future is ML, with languages dedicated to specific use cases and niches. And also ML languages easily readable by AI.
After 3-4 years, sure. But eventually enough has changed it's worth redoing.
From the essay:
"Unix and C are the ultimate computer viruses.
A further benefit of the worse-is-better philosophy is that the programmer is conditioned to sacrifice some safety, convenience, and hassle to get good performance and modest resource use. Programs written using the New Jersey approach will work well both in small machines and large ones, and the code will be portable because it is written on top of a virus.
It is important to remember that the initial virus has to be basically good. If so, the viral spread is assured as long as it is portable. Once the virus has spread, there will be pressure to improve it, possibly by increasing its functionality closer to 90%, but users have already been conditioned to accept worse than the right thing. Therefore, the worse-is-better software first will gain acceptance, second will condition its users to expect less, and third will be improved to a point that is almost the right thing. In concrete terms, even though Lisp compilers in 1987 were about as good as C compilers, there are many more compiler experts who want to make C compilers better than want to make Lisp compilers better.
The good news is that in 1995 we will have a good operating system and programming language; the bad news is that they will be Unix and C++."
https://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
Their creation C and UNIX won over the more advanced LISP and Smalltalk systems because they were simpler to implement. Even their own more advanced Plan 9 based OSs could not displace the more widespread unix-like systems.
It seems distribution and 'good enough' to rely on always wins. IMO, dynamic languages like Perl, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, PHP and the heavily marketed Java provided good enough high level facilities that have prevented people from reaching for Lisp and Smalltalk.
Looking at it through this lens, perhaps C++ was the vehicle for strapping some high level facilities on a widely adopted low level performant language that made it just good enough of a technology for wide adoption.
In my experience it takes a while (<=3 months) for folks to become proficient when they see an alien dialect of c++. That may sound totally unacceptable to you (fair). Cpp is also a “big tent” language in that it is genuinely multi-paradigm.
I think LLM’s might help, but sometime they hurt too (confidently/persuasively wrong analyses). The gain is large for small/trivial contributions. For changes that require genuine understanding, I’m not sure (large error bars personally as to whether the sign is even positive).
Followed a couple of years later contribution to Go's design, exactly to avoid C++ at Google.
... as it is disappointing.
Not everything that can be done should be done.
If that's an incremental build though (i.e. simply rebuilding after changing a few files), there's something very wrong.
https://www.fastbuild.org/docs/home.html
the only thing i was regularly using (Loki library) for was the assoc_vector
2. Meet your hero
3. Start an awkward conversation with your hero.
It always goes like this no matter what you try.
But it was indeed a nice book that really made stataic polymorphism popular. Before that, most books focused on building object hierarchies with virtual functions, etc.
I would say the same thing of Rust.
It took in almost every idea, and the battlefield showed us which do work and which don't. We get to keep RAII, move vs copy, smart pointers, placement-new, and generics. We get to drop auto_ptr, copy-by-default, its specific exceptions implementation (fight me), multiple virtual inheritance, and templates as full code substitution.
In my opinion the battles have played out, and Rust is the best sum-up of what worked (it even inherited the compile times! Lucky us!)
When a game or program is made with C++, it's usually nice because performance is mostly guaranteed. But if someone told me to write C++ myself, I'd cry. There's too much to memorize, and the standards are too varied. When I go to a project site for maintenance and it's a C++ project, I instantly lose energy — because it's just too difficult.
I'd be happy if someone else wrote it, but it's not a language I want to write myself
I have to go through the same warm-up more or less for any language I work with, so it's not that different than writing Python, Go or Java for me.
You don't learn or know C++ in the way you learn or know C.
You never have the total language spec in mind. Much of it you will never (and for some of it should never) come across.
The way I think of it
C is an abstraction of the machine, so thin it's nearly transparent.
C++ is an abstraction over programming paradigms, letting you pick how you think.
Everything else abstracts the machine away, replacing it with a VM, runtime, or model of its own.
The same way a good project has a clear model of the problem it should have a clear C++ pattern in use.
Looks like someone fell for the C abstract machine trap yet again. No, C is isn’t an abstraction of the machine.
https://spawn-queue.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3212477.3212479
I couldn't do that with mciropython on any platform.
C is a thin abstraction, python isn't.
There's basically dozens of very nice languages inside C++. That can be a blessing or a curse.
I'm anxious for Herb Sutter's CPP2/CPPFront to become a standard.
https://github.com/hsutter/cppfront/commits/main/
Tbh I never expected that experiment to go anywhere. I guess that leaves Carbon (and large scale efforts to rewrite C++ in Rust).
Nobody has said they are using them in anything important, but hopefully that is coming.
Chromium is gonna be more conservative than that for sure.
Why? It doesn't remove complexity, it (partially) hides it and makes the whole thing even more complex.
Then I design the thing I want to build. I always design what I want to build beforehand. This takes a couple of iterations from high level to low-ish level. That last design becomes a bit language dependent. Then I select some of the core tools that I'm going to use (which kind of pointers, classes or structs, etc.)
With that design in mind, I go "library shopping" both for file formats (if any) or other stuff like vectors, etc.
Armed with the reference docs of these, I write my code with the toolbelt I have built for the project.
Some things are hard, but they are not impossible. I find thinking like compiler helps a lot.
The varying standards are no different to major python versions or go versions - arguably there’s even less between most versions than there is in your average go release.
The differences in apps and frameworks don’t matter for day to day - std::string, Unreal’s FString and QT’s QString all are similar enough that 99.9% of the time.
Metaprogramming is one of those things; you either write it or you don’t. Knowing some basics is required but the vast majority of people use a handful of pre existing things without understanding the nuances of how it works under the hood.
Is it? Java has changed a lot, but in such a way that it's still easy to mentally map new features to the old ones, provided you have understood the core language. IDEs can even convert your code from old to new and back.
It's not a new feature. And tbh, compared to Typescript, C++ templates are tame ;)
(but yeah, deciding when to stop digging into the template metaprogramming rabbit hole requires some common sense and sanity, too much template complexity is almost never worth the hassle)
Unreal Engine depends on C++20 at this point.
https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/unreal-engine/epic-c...
How is that different from other languages, which don't need the brain warm-up?
Otherwise it's not different for me. I don't feel different while writing with any other language. I guess the main reason is I always think like the computer first and translate that thinking to the programming language at hand.
Related, the main problem with the C++ ecosystem is that everybody carves out their own language subset, so it's not one ecosystem but many ecosystems with contradicting styles and language/stdlib subsets. This makes code reuse via libraries much harder than it should be.
[0] https://hftuniversity.com/post/the-c-standard-library-has-be...
Once you get rid of the STL, compile times get so much better. With modern c++23 features, templates actually become really convenient to write, and at the core there is a really useful and pleasant to use language.
I try to avoid c++ libraries and instead rely on c-style APIs. Usually the c++ style libraries force you into using the STL, which comes with a heavy tax on compile times, without much benefit in comfort of use.
I echo the parent commenter - the STL has a massive negative impact on compile times. And for what? The STL is not even fast. The way the standards are written, std::unordered_map has to be implemented as a tree rather than a flat open-addressing hashtable, which would've been far superior due to cache locality.
For my own project I rolled my own string, string_view, map, set, optional, variant, and vector. Only took maybe a day. And that day has paid dividends, as my clean debug builds literally take 3 seconds now.
On the contrary. You can focus exactly on the features the higher level game code needs. The C++ stdlib is (for the most part) poorly designed, usually poorly implemented, the main reason for slow build times, and its complexity explodes because it needs to consider all edge cases that most code bases don't ever trigger.
A specialized dynamic array class in a few hundred lines (at most!) and with just the required features is much more useful than the 20kloc monster that's pulled in with `#include <vector>` and which doesn't even do bounds checking in the 'idiomatic' usage.
You complain about it not being suitable for game development in one comment but then expect bounds checking in release builds? You're sitting in multiple lanes at the same time.
NIH implementations are usually grossly inferior because as it turns out, it's quite hard to get it right and those edge-cases aren't important until you start getting bitten by them when you'd rather be shipping features.
Bounds checking overhead is negligible for all but the absolutely hottest code paths (fwiw we shipped active asserts, including bounds checking asserts in all the PC games I was involved with - carefully monitoring the overhead of course).
The main reason to not use the stdlib isn't so much about squeezing out the last bit of performance, but about control of what actually happens under the hood (and also compilation times). The overall runtime cost of all those active asserts (not just the range checks, everything) was somewhere in the 2..3% range, which is fine when budgeted for upfront.
I personally am more conservative on those things. I'll pick the fastest thing that is reliable.
We can all agree it's not medical systems, but audio DSP and game dev both end up rewriting a lot of STL stuff to suit their needs, and often using a restricted subset of modern C++ features for similar reasons.
That isn't some arbitrary choice, but pretty much where everyone continually ends up when solving real-time problems using C++. Whether those be games or not.
For example, both of these return the 3rd element of a std::vector:
Most of the rest of us STL is good enough.
Not uncommon for audio companies to also write their own containers and internal STL for ex. plugins as well.
Yes, it can exhibit non-optimal performance, and in some specific cases (regex's especially), extremely poor performance, but that's not the same as being poorly designed and implemented, especially given the breadth of the thing.
The ABI Nightmare - The C++ committee has this extraordinarily weird and strict rule: never break the Application Binary Interface (ABI). If a better algorithm or memory layout is discovered, the standard library cannot adopt it because doing so would change object layouts and break existing binaries. The worst part is that this ABI is never defined, so you always HEAVILY pay for what you DON'T use.
std::regex - the Programming Language Joke of the millennium. Even an interpreted language regex engine runs faster.
std::map, std::unordered_map - outdated, badly-designed and slow crap that is beaten even by high-school coders writing map data-structures.
No bounds checking. And Undefined Behavior by Default for operators like std::vector::operator[]
std::iostream - bloated, expensive design, std::vector<bool> - another joke.
Silent Iterator Invalidations causing unpredictable memory corruption.
No deprecation strategy. There are FOUR callable wrappers. At-least, have the courage to say @DEPRECATED.
No Standard Networking.
Missing System Utilities - nothing for process management, standard cryptography, or basic command-line argument parsing, etc.
To be honest, this is just the common complaints - if you run through all the stdlib features, there are dozens of severe problems. Which all the smart people know about, but are forbidden to fix - because of ABI!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Stepanov
1. Stepanov's generic programming is a good idea. Every language you've seen with "generics" that's his idea, to the extent "The STL" is generic programming, everybody agreed it's a good idea.
2. But the STL is very old now, so while the idea is good, this is one of the oldest (Stepanov had tried this in other languages before C++) implementations and so other implementations are often better, because they've learned from experience
3. As well as pretty good generic algorithms, the STL also provides a lot of container types (what Rust would call collection types) and these vary not between "excellent" and "mediocre" but between "mediocre" and "inexplicably terrifying". The most charitable explanation is that they're just intended for teaching. If you teach DS&A to a Computer Science class you want the Extrusive Doubly Linked List to teach in class. If you write software you almost certainly never need this type, but it's front an centre in the C++ STL.
There's a single "I guess I would use this" container type, std::vector. It has an insane special case for bool, because WG21 are idiots, but it's otherwise a good enough growable array type and it's not worth building your own instead given the constraints.
Everything else is silly, or bad, or both. std::unordered_map feels like a hash table I made in class in the mid 1990s, but it's actually the provided standard hash table container in C++ 11 onwards. std::list is just that extrusive linked list for some insane reason. The Microsoft standard library maintainer STL could not offer me any justification for what std::deque is actually supposed to be for.
Case in point: list::sort. You don't want to try running quicksort on a linked list. Or remove_if: great we've abstracted the difficult task of removing things without erasing them, except we can't do it on maps. (C++20 seems to add an erase_if, apparently admitting that the two-step remove/erase is silly).
Then there's the fact that C++ iterators are basically pointers into the data structure, where for vectors (your common case) you'd do much better with index/container pairs, both for stability and bounds checking.
STD::sort only works on a random access iterator, it won’t even compile if you try it on a list
About that one... I would claim that in a majority of cases where an std::vector is used, what the author really wanted was a similar type, but whose size and capacity are fixed on construction and never change. The standard C++ library does not offer such a type - so people use vector because it's handy.
Agree with your takes on most of the containers. I also dislike how optionals are never used with containers as they were standardized later (and even then, problematically w.r.t. references). Thus, for example, if I lookup an object in a map of T's, the result should IMNSHO be an optional reference to a T.
There is std::array for that. Also, for a type with fixed capacity but variable (up to that capacity) size, we're getting std::inplace_vector soon™.
* APIs/function signatures explain more clearly what are the intended uses of the structure that's passed.
* More potential for compiler optimization
* Some potential for having these on the stack (if the compiler deduces the size already at compile-time)
* More convenient for static analysis
* No plethora of confusing constructors (including the infernal two-element ctors which can be misinterpreted super-easily)
etc.
I see that problem much more often than crashes due to unchecked map lookups in production, which are very rare for me. Less than once a year.
People love to rag on the standards committee. I was on X3J11, the C Language Standards Committee, in 1989 ... in fact, due to alphabetical order I was the first person on the planet to vote to approve the C language standard -- the one that first standardized register and trigraphs. Standards work is hard and everyone hates you for it.
Or _Keywords with an additional header file?
Maybe something_ names as proper namespaces are too hard?
One could mention better testing before adding features to the standards, but then C99 VLAs happened.
The standard library is mostly fine to use unless you have specific needs.
The bit about libraries is nonsense, sorry.
I mean, why are they blaming the standard library for inherent properties of linked lists? Yeah, you don't want to use them without good reason. That's just called picking the right data structure for the job, not a flaw with the standard library.
Some of the other choices were tradeoffs between performance and usability. The standard maps have stable iterators, whereas third-party implementations almost never do because you can write faster implementations if you're willing to live without those guarantees. Was it the right choice in hindsight? Maybe, maybe not.
I'd personally like to see a namespaced versioned standard library but like that's ever going to happen
- Keep a small stdlib, like JavaScript (especially earlier JavaScript): everyone complains about missing features, warring communities form around jQuery promises vs. Promises/A+ vs. callbacks, supply chain attacks, left-pad/is-even dependencies, etc.
- Grow a big stdlib while keeping backward compatibility, like C++: lots of cruft left around that must never be used, sitting next to newer stuff with similar names. People complain about the bloat.
- Grow a big stdlib and then break backward compatibility, like Python 2 -> 3: everyone is sad, the ecosystem churns for years.
I admit there are probably better and worse versions of each strategy, e.g., it seems to me like JavaScript's slow-but-steady accretion of primitives over time has gone OK, and it seems like apart from Python 2 -> 3 some of the PEPs I see for deprecations and replacements are reasonable. But no language has ever hit on a strategy that everyone loves, as far as I can tell.
Edit: Also not sure what can possibly be downvoted here.
Regular expressions in C++ are an example "everybody" advises against using, but it's still there. vector<bool> will stay forever and so on.
Also the nice thing about having a large set of features is that C,++ allows you to write very nice abstractions (or not) at both very low or at very high level. In other words you can be very low level with online ASM and bit operations and bit and direct memory manipulation or very high level almost like a script language. Whatever the problem domain needs C++ has got you covered.
That's what it's like to be a C++ programmer.
You'll end up with a strong understanding of the subset of the language that's actually useful for the thing you want to build.
As a side note, regarding your profile info, unless you are based in North Korea, please at least add one 0 to your rate. You'll get more long-term and high-quality clientele.
Or even far less than that. I like to use it as C with lambdas and namespaces. Sprinkle in metaprogramming as needed. Even just not having to remember to call cleanup code thanks to dtors would alone be enough to sell me on it.
Back in the 90's, it was the main business language alongside Smalltalk, Delphi and VB.
Hence the plethora of C++ frameworks to chose from, sadly most dead since .NET and Java took over most of the use cases.
If someone tells you to write a web app, do you also cry? Surely there's more JavaScript frameworks than subsets of C++ at this point, no? Do you also go memorize all of them? Or do you just quickly pick one, and then only learn that one, and forget the rest exist? Because that's kinda how you approach C++. You pick a subset (like, say, just modern C++, only caring about C++17 & later or whatever), and just use that. And move on with your life. There's absolutely no reason to learn how std::auto_ptr works because it's dead in the same way you aren't learning how PHP & CGI works if you're making a modern web app. They're dead relics of the past that you can just pretend don't exist.
There are fundamental technical choices to deliver that, but also ergonomic things like notice Rust's []::sort is a stable sort, whereas C++ std::sort is an unstable sort. If you don't know about sort stability in Rust what you wrote works and in C++ you get a nasty surprise.
std::map (which is not a hash map, which is what most people would expect), std::move (which doesn't move), std::vector (which is not a vector), and std::vector<bool> (which is not even a std::vector).
That's not actionable information, except in the sense that the correct action is "don't use C++". Because sure, I know about sort stability, and I know about pointer provenance, and about memory ordering, but there might be any number of things I do not know and unfortunately in C++ "you should know and understand" absolutely everything at all times, which is not viable.
† The C++ standard library sorts are both much slower than in Rust, but hey, they're also both less safe so you're really getting the worst of both worlds
Why, exactly, is the c++ std::sort "wrong"? There are tradeoffs both ways. You happen to prefer stable sorting to speed, but that is a preference not an objective fact.
It's silently an unstable sort, which is surprising, and then to add insult to injury it's also slower. Yeah, I know, the C++ unstable sort is so slow it's slower than Rust's stable sort.
YMMV for input types, sizes etc but generally that's what the numbers look like and though it's not universal it's actually quite common. "I bet the C++ is faster" is the wrong instinct, sometimes by a large margin.
Many of us don't like C, it was already too little and too unsafe, when the first C++ compilers started to hit the market in early 1990's, hence why all desktop OSes moved into C++ for their frameworks.
The return to C has caused by the rise of FOSS, UNIX winning the server room, and early GNU coding standards to use only C as main compiled language.
Additionally as many other programming language ecosystems have discovered, it is easy to beat C++ in version 1.0, and eventually all of them grow to get the complexity of their own.
I reach for C++, because the language runtimes, compiler tooling, and GPGPU frameworks I care about are partially written in C++, and I am not in the place to be writing new ecosystems myself.
Most of our customers use C, probably for historic reasons but also because it is much much easier to reason about and that becomes very important when auditing for functional safety certification. If someone's life depends on your software, you really want to be able to reason about its correctness because orange jumpsuits enhance no one's complexion.
Many of customers are now using C++. From the problems they have reported, well, they just shouldn't. It's not that it is a bad language (it isn't) or that it is inherently unsafe (it really isn't: exceptions are safer than propagating return values as long as you use them in exception conditions, because not catching one will return you to a designed safe state very quickly, and RAII is the best thing since sliced cheese). It's that cutting and pasting from Stack Overflow, and now vibe coding, makes for massive codebases that are next to impossible to reason about. I now see a lot of problems from customers where my first reaction is "don't write code like that" and "you can write bad JavaScript code in any language, can't you?". While it butters my bread and I enjoy the language, I really recommend against using C++ for safety-certified embedded software. Stick to C.
It is quite relevant to note that the C authors, were keen to explore Alef as alternative on Plan 9, and based on the learnings reduced C's role on Inferno, and eventually took part in Go's design.
Even though they were not keen into using C++ (Plan 9 doesn't even support it), they were also aware C wasn't to be used for everything.
You're almost certainly better off with Rust at this point or, if you must have C-like development, Zig.
There isn't even much of a "return" there. In fact, AFAIK, C++ expanded over C the entire time.
The ecosystem isn't fine - just to get a project going requires picking a non-trivial set of tools and approaches, none of which the C++ standard enforces or guides to.
For example, will you manage dependencies via packages? If so, with what? What will you use for building your project? The list goes on and on.
The language keeps growing, with
- new features overlapping old features from previous standards without replacing them or deprecating them (function::copyable_function vs std::function, std::less<> key for transparent lookup in maps)
- new features not usable by the layman (coroutines ...)
- Cryptic syntax (reflection...)
- Stuff you are told not to use because of performance reason and that cant be fixed because of ABI (regex)
- Compile errors that are 1km long (no, concepts are not helping here, the 'nicer' message is still buried into a hot pile of template instantiation callstack).
It's easy to compare new and old languages, and saying older languages are wrinkly. Let's see how other shiny programming languages look like when they are 40 years old.
Sure, none is perfect and they have cruft and warts, but they are not such a mess as C++ is.
sudo-rs was pulling in 1M+ LOC as its dependency chain at one point. I believe they removed the biggest offenders, but I didn't check it recently.
If you'd already been using it for 10+ years you wouldn't feel that way, because you'd already have memorized a lot of it.
- new features overlapping old features previous standards without replacing them or deprecating them. - new features not usable by the layman - ...
See function::copyable_function vs std::function, modules, coroutines, Reflection syntax is cryptic at best, ...
Hell, if you wait long enough, they'll just deprecate it before you can care to bother.
But if you work with C++ in professional context, you will encounter it somewhere (library, teamate's PR, legacy code, LLM output, book / blog / conference ...). |
You actually need to know the bad stuff to be able to judge it and discard it.
Im talking about your own personal coding. You dont have to use the new things. You dont have to know them to decide to discard them. In fact, the criteria to discard something is to not know it. You generally shouldn't be using things you dont know anyway.
The fact that other people use things you do not know is not a reason to stress out about the dumb pace and direction c++ is moving in. It is possible to enjoy a life free from fomo about the c++ standards goalposts.
I had an idea for a special reminder app I wanted for myself. It's complicated enough that it comes to 9,000+ lines of code. I wanted to write it using the C++ UI library wxWidgets, because I like that wxWidgets uses native widgets, and is cross-platform, and that it's easy to make an app look nice. And that it doesn't use tons of memory.
There's a wxPython library, but I didn't want my UI to be limited due to whatever gaps may exist in that wrapper.
So I had AI write it in C++. Took about a day for me to get it done. It's perfectly solid. It did hit a couple of memory errors when I first used it, but I could give the AI MacOS crash report and the AI fixed the bugs easily, with no other involvement from me. (I compiled in a debug-friendly mode; no downside to that because it was just for me and was plenty fast enough.)
25 years or so ago, I was a fairly good C++ programmer. Haven't touched it since. And that includes this application, which was completely AI-written.
0: https://dianne.skoll.ca/projects/remind/
Web devs are just users playing in a C++ dev’s program. ;)
For the language of the web I'd probably nominate HTML.
For the language of the internet it's a lot less clear to me.
However, I'm a my own kind of weird. I cannot watch a documentary that's made out of people saying short sentences. I get that it's made to 'have them tell the story', but I need a narrator to tell me what to think because I get distracted.
Still lots of love to the creators, of course.
Apparently, they are making documentaries about open source software.
On top of that, C++ allows to design very concise APIs. (One of my favorite examples is sol2: https://github.com/ThePhd/sol2).
Library code involving templates, on the other hand, can be pretty complex and hard to read. Concepts and other C++20 features (like [[no_unique_address]]) are certainly an improvement, but only new projects with no backwards compatibility requirements can actually use them (unconditionally).
That's how you emulate language features that aren't there originally. I've "impelemented" a static code block, like in Java:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/34321324/1593077
and that's all in C++98. The implementation is a bit ugly but the use is terse and self-expalantory.
isn't kotlin supposed to be the future for JVM?
Because of AI, right?
The language which still supports C-style pointers, arbitrary datatype conversions, and inherits architecture-specific undefined behavior gives you too many ways to fail at solving a problem.
As a programmer, I love coding in C++ because I know what I'm doing. I'd hate reviewing C++ code though.
AI is also probably more effective with statically typed languages since the compiler catches a wider range of errors.
Coding languages have been developing for speed of (manual) writing - akin to how human languages did with modern alphabets. Now that writing is a lot easier, languages will likely evolve towards a focus on execution (or in the case of human languages, speed of reading and precision of understanding)
- more accessible now that AI handles the high tooling activation energy
- more history and pre-AI internet content
- pybind11 is pretty popular to pair Python logic with C++ performance
- cpp committe is pretty bullish on new contracts and reflection features making C++ a glue language that AI can write well
Is this good or bad?
All the popular PLs have this problem to some extent.
[0]: https://www.slashdata.co/research/developer-population
[1]: https://www.slashdata.co/company/methodology
[2]: https://developernation.net/
And I wonder what the number is for other languages.
They want my email just to look at their "free report". Sorry that's not good to happen.
(if you mean that film, most likely no.)