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."

Comments

Feels Dated

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Feels Dated

[Vanders]

I'm one of these irritating DevOps types.

The Dev side of me loves Ruby. It's a nice language, it's powerful, the standard library is nicely complete and there are Gems for pretty much everything I could ever need.

The Ops side of me hates Ruby. Managing all those Gems on any given server is just horrible, rbenv & rvm need to die in a fire, there are a apparently one hundred different ways to run an application and proxy requests to it, and of courses Gems exist outside of the system package manager and that's always bad.

Keeps getting better.

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:Keeps getting better.

[Anrego]

I'll agree with C++11 in particular added a lot of stuff that I've been whining about for a long time. It's certainly moved forward and not backwards, and as you said, has managed not to rustle too many jimmies along the way.

That said, with improvements in hardware and languages like Java becoming way more practical, I just find it hard to justify using c++ for anything that doesn't absolutely need to be in c++, and JNI has made "so just write that one part in c++" a common option as well.

Not saying the useful space for c++ is gone, just that it's shrinking, and in the area I work, it's practically gone.

Not just dated...

[davecb]

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:

Everyone knows 40% of C++. Unfortunately, it's never the same 40%.

Standard Library is both a strength and weakness

[PhrostyMcByte]

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#.

I think it's great

[Stele]

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.

STL issues...

[wiredog]

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:

Syntax error: unmatched thing in thing from std::nonstd::_ _map<_Cyrillic, _$$$dollars>const basic_string< epic_mystery,mongoose_traits < char>, _ _default_alloc_<casual_Fridays = maybe>>