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It's just C with two plus signs, how hard could it be? (thelemmy.club)
submitted 2 months ago* by to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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Edit: sorry I didn't realize I already posted this

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[–] 34 points 2 months ago (6 children)

I watched an hour long video on why C++ sucks. I thought it wouldn't be too hard to pick up since I can program well in probably 7 languages. I was wrong, now I'm convinced C++ is a dumpster fire and needs to die and I'll never get a job in it unless someone holds a gun to my kid.

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  • [–] 22 points 2 months ago

    To be fair, an hour long video about why C++ sucks maybe isn't the best source if you're trying to get a balanced view.

    I'll out myself: I kind of like C++. Yes, it definitely has its sharp edges, but I like how much you can do with it. You can do object oriented, functional, procedural, in fact there's not much it can't do. You can stay high level or you can go very low level (pretty much just drop into C if necessary). Yes, it's complex, but once you have a decent feel for it you can do a massive amount with it, especially with the newest versions. And that despite it running on bare metal without any VM or anything. Probably the most frustrating part for me is that the standard library is in many cases stuck with old C++ paradigms. But otherwise, I like C++.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago

    I love that video but I also love C++. He is right that C++ has an endless list of moderately bad to horrible design flaws, but a lot of those are related to features that you can (in many cases) simply decide not to use. So you don't really need to master them and I'd bet that the majority of C++ developers are unaware of many issues raised in the video and in the end their software still works to an acceptable degree. To me the main advantage of C++ over any other language is that it is widely used in really cool applications. Of course it's subjective what's a cool application and what isn't, but I recommend just typing C++ into a job search website of your choice and contrasting the results with those of other languages to see what I mean.

    If you're interested in the language, it's good to be aware of all these issues, but don't let it discourage you from learning the basics and contextualizing these issues for yourself.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Genuine question:

    Would you have a reccomendation for a comparable alternative?

    Like, I have experience with a good deal of scripting languages, sql variants... am currently trying to do Morton coding/interleaving for octrees in Godot.

    I have the framework working in GDScript... theoretically, if its not performant enough, i could either attempt to transition it to C++ / GDExtension... or, potentially, I could do a 'Rustdot' type thing, apparently its possible to... do that.

    So, while I am only really aware of Rust as a potential alternative to C++, in my specific context... would you have a broader opinion of lower level languages? I just actually don't know much about them.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 child)

    I mean, gdscript in godot is very nice and convenient. It offloads a lot of the heavy labor to the engine already and is very well optimised. If you need more speed and type safety C# is the logical next step. C# is very convenient and easy to pick up if you already know Typescript for being a strict language.

    Also the guy's criticism of C++ is basically that nothing is bundled in and keeping libraries compatible with each other is a PhD level activity. The packages are also allowed to fuck with your code with macros, preprocessing directives etc. on top of being written in a non-compatible standard where they only provide a compiled binary with an ABI instead of giving you the source. Updating dependencies becomes a massive pain also because of the same reason since it can so easily break everything without any reasonable stack trace. You might say "Ok whatever, I'll just preprocess my C++ and rename all by variables" but dependencies can also break other dependencies with macros so there's no escape. One dep updates, another one breaks in an 100% unrelated part of the program.

    But for a reasonably sized project where C++ dependencies are already handled by Godot it's not that bad. Especially if you're the only developer or have at least good codebase standards on what parts of C++ you will use. I've personally not had any issues programming in C++ but that's probably because I've never done anything at any scale whatsoever.

    I don't have a strong opinion on lower level languages since I work in garbage collected languages but I've heard good things about Zig, heard Rust in slow-mo development with a steep learning curve but very robust, C is nice and simple but lacks modern features.

    TL;DR C++ devs would kill to get something like cargo in Rust, not because it's a package manager but because it's a standard for sharing code and managing compatability. If that's not an issue for you C++ is a solid language like any other.

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