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GCC Switches From C to C++
According to a post on the GNU Compiler Collection list, GCC is now built as a C++ program by default. This is the fruition of much effort, and the goal now is to clean up the GCC internals that are reportedly pretty type-unsafe by rewriting them using C++ classes and templates.
Bad code is bad code, and you can write it in any language, yes, even visual basic.net.
So the point is not so much "how useless are those lousy GCC devs who will write crappy code", but "how good are those GCC devs now they have a more powerful tool in their hands".
I'd hope they start to discover the STL too, and use the standard containers at the very least - no need to use custom ones unless you either continue to use the existing C-based ones, or you have some very specific performance issues that you absolutely cannot fix any other way (and generally, you don't have this problem with the STL)
Now, sure, I hope they don't discover cool new features like STL algorithms and start to litter the code with lamba-d functors.
GCC as a compiler and a community seems to really be moving, it is probably due to the competition from LLVM, but atleast for now, GCC is still the better compiler, and I wish them the best of luck.
Good compilers benefits everybody!
I used to be more polite to ignorant C++ haters. But I've lost patience.
A program written in C++ is going to be slower than an equivalent program written in C, no way around it.
There is a way around it: by not being an astonishingly incompetent developer.
And that's without even getting into features like templates, which only five people in the world understand.
Don't assume everyone is as dim as you.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
You can do all kinds of nifty stuff with macros and gcc/clang extensions to provide type safety to C
Yes, I know.
You can write a GENERATE_SORT(Type, Comparator) macro which generates a sort function to work on an array of Type, using the specified comparator, and has no name collisions and is type safe using liberal amounts of ## and so on.
The point is not that you can't do them in C (you can), but the methods for doing it are ad-hoc. By moving the functionality into the compiler, C++ provides a regularity of syntax for such things that C lacks.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
No. 22 more years has seen Challenger and Columbia blow up, and we've learnt some lessons about things we should do and things we shouldn't do. Just as the Challenger investigation didn't conclude, "Ban O-rings," nobody has decided to ban parts of C++, either.
C++ is in some ways like a human language: It has an enormous range of things you can say in it. Some of them are only appropriate in certain situations. Some of them are never appropriate if you want people to take you seriously. Some of them just plain don't make sense.
So quite a lot of the development over those 22 years has been in the community learning idioms that let you use the power of C++ without hurting yourself.
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I don't write 'university code' though; and I'm not out to impress a professor or win 'elegance awards'.
I think the enormous chip on your shoulder might be obscuring your view of C++.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Actually the correct comparison is to not only disable exceptions in the compiler, but in addition adding hand-crafted error handling to the code. Because manual error handling also costs performance. And without error handling, your application is broken, period (and yes, I have been bitten by applications doing improper error handling. And yes, that included data loss. Loss of data stored on the hard disk, because the application didn't do any error checking when replacing the file with a new version. Fortunately I could get back most of it from the nightly backup).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.