C++ 2011 and the Return of Native Code

snydeq writes with an editorial in InfoWorld about the resurgence of native code. From the article: "Modern programmers have increasingly turned away from native compilation in favor of managed-code environments such as Java and .Net, which shield them from some of the drudgery of memory management and input validation. Others are willing to sacrifice some performance for the syntactic comforts of dynamic languages such as Python, Ruby, and JavaScript. But C++11 arrives at an interesting time. There's a growing sentiment that the pendulum may have swung too far away from native code, and it might be time for it to swing back in the other direction. Thus, C++ may have found itself some unlikely allies."

Comments

Never went away

[i ate my neighbour]

Native was never away. It always has its place. It is just that performance/efficiency is not always top priority.

Re:Yikes

[CadentOrange]

This keeps getting brought up, but I've written commercial C++ code for years and I've not had memory management issues. There have been problems with legacy 3rd party libraries, but if you religiously apply the RAII ( https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/RAII ) idiom you will usually be fine. I can't remember the last time I worked with a raw pointer and had to new/delete my own memory.

Re:Yikes

[AuMatar]

Yes, because managed code has no memory leaks. Please. I work on a mixed C++/Java Android codebase. I haven't found a memory leak on the C++ side in months. The Android framework decides to hold onto random references every new version.

Quite frankly, memory management is not hard. If you don't understand the simple idea of allocate, use, release, then you are a complete incompetent and should not be programming professionally. I'll go so far as to say it's better for a language NOT to automatically manage your memory- in general the first sign of a bad or failing architecture is that object life cycles and memory allocation start to be non-trivial. Managing your own memory catches those architecture bugs and leads to cleaner, easier to understand code. And the cost is absolutely minimal, I doubt I've spent 10 minutes in the past 2 or 3 years actually debugging memory problems in C++.

Smart people know already...

[giuseppemag]

...choose the tool that's best for the job, don't choose the job that's best for the tools you know already.

Game developers, for instance, are among the guys who write the most performance sensitive code out there, and they use a mix of C, C++, C#, Lua/Python for the various parts of the game. Usually the inner, tight loop is written in C/C++, higher level modules are written in C# and designer/modder scripts are written in a very high level language such as Lua. There is no best language in general, and whoever says otherwise is often an idiot.