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C++ and the STL 12 Years Later: What Do You Think Now?
profBill (98315) writes "Way back in 2002, Slashdot ran a story asking what people thought about C++ and the STL. Well, it's 2014 and C++11 is well out there with C++14 on its way.
I teach a second programming course in C++ with a heavy emphasis on the STL (containers and generic algorithms). I just wondered what people think about the situation today. Personally, I think C++11 has cleaned up a lot of problems, making it easier to use, but given all those who work with C++ for a living, I wondered what they thought today compared to then. Are people using C++11? Does it matter at all? I'd love to share the responses with my students! They are always curious about what practitioners are doing these days."
I teach a second programming course in C++ with a heavy emphasis on the STL (containers and generic algorithms). I just wondered what people think about the situation today. Personally, I think C++11 has cleaned up a lot of problems, making it easier to use, but given all those who work with C++ for a living, I wondered what they thought today compared to then. Are people using C++11? Does it matter at all? I'd love to share the responses with my students! They are always curious about what practitioners are doing these days."
This will probably come off as a troll, but it's really not intended to be. And keep in mind this is just my experience in my domain with the type of projects I've worked with. There's lots of different domains/projects sets where this wouldn't apply.
I used to love c++ and berade people who used wimp languages like Java. These days I mainly use java, and when I do have to use c++, it feels painfully dated.
At to C++11, while it added some useful stuff, in general it feels like it's just flailing while trying to bring in some of the language features of newer/more modern languages. The new concurrency stuff in particular is just plain unseemly.
Also, a relatively minor but annoying and long-standing problem with doing anything non-trivial in c++ is the lack of consistency between 3rd party libraries. Java has spoiled me into expecting everything to adhere to one convention, but with a c++ project as soon as you've got more than a few external libraries, you end up with a huge mess of code that doesn't mix properly, and writing adapters for everything to get that consistency is just insane.
Long rant short: I'm finding myself using c++ now mainly for:
- small bits of functionality to be used via JNI
- small stuff mainly focused around one library/task (Qt, pqxx, whatever)
Doing anything large and complex with c++ these days just doesn't appeal to me any more. I can build it much faster with java, it'll be more maintainable, and performance wise it's fine for what I do.
Also: floating bottom popup ads.. really dice? You just fell off one mans adblock whitelist.
Totally biased, non-specific: Having written more than 1M lines of C++ in the late 80's early 90's, back when I'd have killed for an STL, I think every iteration adds real improvements without generating divisions amongst professional developers (unlike iterations of Java).
I've used it off and on since "c with classes", and while it's regularly improved at the detail level, it's still
- non-orthogonal
- complex
- exceedingly subtle in spots.
I think the best characterization is still Ozan's:
davecb@spamcop.net
The STL does one thing very well: it's very predictable performance-wise while being reasonably useable.
When you use it, you know perfectly what the performance is going to be.
It also offers some occasionally-useful features (std::weak_ptr for instance). c++11's move constructors and rvalue references are very good for squeezing out the last bit of performance where possible and for ensuring exception safety to certain operations; although it's mostly useful for very low-level, entrenched libraries such as the STL. Lambdas are syntactic sugar, but a well flavored one.
c++ is now a very different beast than it was in the 90s. If used properly, it can be very effective (performance-wise) in complex projects. But it can also give programmers tons of rope to hang themselves with.
I don't know anyone who worries about garbage collection in C++11.
Quite. The OS cleans it all up after the application exits, anyway.
Stick Men
The C++ standard library is probably the highest quality standard library of any language I've seen.
It is documented down to an very low level. I can't count the number of time I've been using some .NET library only to find out that it has some undocumented requirement, quirk, or wildly unexpected time complexity. You never get things like that in the C++ standard library -- assuming you've read the documentation thoroughly, you should never be surprised.
The standard library takes full advantage of the language, and it's as lean as ever with the "don't pay for what you don't use" mantra generally remaining in full effect.
A downside? I may be able to develop something that uses a tenth the RAM and half the CPU in C++, but despite the strengths mentioned above, it's going to take me at least twice as long and I'm going to need to juggle a number of inconsistent 3rd party libraries -- no doubt some of them being plain C so I'll need to make some RAII wrappers, etc. -- it remains incredibly low-level.
Boost picks up some of the slack, but C++ really needs more of the things commonly used today. Things like HTTP, XML, web services, SQL, configuration, and cryptography should be built in, but they're only just now looking at a simple sockets library. This is a huge weakness. C++ is used in a lot of low-level situations so I don't know if these should be part of the standard library proper, but at the minimum an additional "framework" standard that implements high-level stuff for the more common unconstrained users would be immensely useful.
The language itself is very strong, and C++14 cements even more useful things into it. The only things I wish they'd add is LINQ and async functionality similar to C#.
They added far too many features to the language in order to please everyone. Why? People who need high level languages have plenty of others to choose from.
Personally I got sick of it and its never ending increase in complexity and just stick with a sort of C with classes and the occasional use of the STL and thats it. In fact sometimes I'll just use plain C. If I need a language with really high level constructs then thats what Python was invented for.
Unlike a lot of commenters here, I actually use C++ every day, and have been for about 20 years. I think the evolution of the language has been great.
I write software for the digital visual effects industry, and it has to be fast, portable, and adaptable. To that end I tend to write as light-weight low-level code as possible, strongly separated from the UI, since I never know where I may end up needing to use it. For instance, when we decided to put a bunch of our filters on iOS, it pretty much worked as-is.
One key to writing nice clean portable code is to avoid dragging in too many dependencies. At the lowest level, about the only external dependencies I used are a few things from boost. But with C++11, a lot of that functionality has moved into the core language (or the standard library). Threading and synchronization primitives such as atomic_int, thread, and mutex are now part of the language, and no longer need to be brought in from boost. This makes everything much cleaner, especially with build/test integration.
lambdas are another thing I really like. Instead of writing messy functors (for auto-threading image processing kernels for example) I can drop the code in-line using a lambda. Much more readable and cuts down on complexity.
The new move-semantics have also made nice improvements to code design and performance, allowing you to move whole objects around with practically zero cost as if they were references.
On the UI side of things I usually use Qt, and there have been C++11-related improvements there as well, such as signals and slots now being type-safe.
D *is* neat.
The only problem is lack of momentum.
It was Bjarne himself who said that there are two kinds of programming languages: those everyone complains about, and those that nobody uses.
On-topic, lots of people are going to hate C++, for its multi-paradigm "everything and the kitchen sink" approach combined with near-C-compatibility and low-levelness. It's the kind of language where two programmers come up with five different ways to do the same thing, and four of them are probably wrong in non-obvious ways. It's fun though, in the way that a high-performance sports car is fun to drive, but easy to wipe out.
I've been using it professionally for 15 years now, and if I observe anything, it's that the longer I use it, the more my stuff looks like C. I keep shaking my head at younger colleagues mis-using templates all over the place ("re-usability!", and hour-long compile times, coupled with really non-obvious implicit conversions and instantiations, never mind the error messages), and object-oriented hierarchies where each object is such a tiny part of the system that you need to remember 10 classes at the same time just to have a slight inkling of what this thing is actually supposed to do.
I still have that nearly irresistible urge to defend the language whenever discussions like these come up, but so much of that is because it's the language I use all bloody day. And then I write something incredibly useful in 10 lines of Python.....
C++ has its place, a masochistic place, ostensibly programming a higher-level abstraction than the people writing plain C ("troglodytes!", but most of them actually seem to know what they are doing and rustle up the higher-level abstractions directly in C, I have respect for you guys), and the people who don't have that much need for low-level features, the last drops of performance or cross-platform compilation (you're probably working in Java, C#, Python, Ruby, and *enjoying it* most of the time. And yes, you Java guys have every right to tear into me about cross-platformness, it's not like it's just hand-waving in C++ either). It's sort of a similar niche to PHP I guess. You know full well that a lot of the reasons for the hate are true, but all you have is this swiss-army-knife of a hammer and everything must be a nail.
Languages that aren't designed top to bottom at the beginning tend to evolve into Frankensteins. Perl, C++ have evolved in accordance with fantastically clever ideas, but end up being more complex than anyone wants to deal with, and a mess of syntax. Java is heading that way too. The question is can anyone put all this cleverness into something simple? Say what you want about things like lisp and scheme, they managed to put incredibly powerful ideas into something that is at its core simple. If only other language designers achieved it too.
I love templates when used in things like vectors, maps, sets, etc. Then combined with the new for loop iteration in C++11 it is great.
But the nightmare is that many people are putting templates into everything so as to accommodate "future" flexibility. But the simple reality is that unless you are programming a hard core library it is a disaster to program flexibility when it is not needed. The end result is code that might score well on a templates test, but will be basically unreadable or alterable by any normal human.
So there seem to be templates as used by programmers and templates as used by showoffs.
From Page 3 of this:
The C++ STL, with its dyslexia-inducing syntax blizzard of colons and angle brackets, guarantees that if you try to declare any reasonable data structure, your first seven attempts will result
in compiler errors of Wagnerian fierceness:
Best Slashdot Co
C++ is to C as Lung Cancer is to Lung.
Trolling is a art,
They did a lot of copy/paste back in the day.
And even that is a better implementation of Templates than C++'s.
C: "Here's a gun. Don't shoot yourself in the foot."
C++: "I see you've been shooting yourself in the foot! Well, here's a different gun, rather like your old one, only we've added a safety and a trigger guard and oh by the way it now shoots 40 caliber shells containing fission-warheads."
Python: "Have a wiffle bat."
When was the last time you ran anywhere? I mean with your own legs, not by pressing 'X'?
#define if(x) if ((x) && (rand() < RAND_MAX * 0.9999))
#define true ((__LINE__&131)!=131)
#define InterlockedAdd(x,y) (*x+=y)
Yeah, C does give you the tools to turn debugging your program into a living hell. ;) With great power comes great responsibility.
When was the last time you ran anywhere? I mean with your own legs, not by pressing 'X'?
JavaScript: "here, let's point your gun at the customers instead".