Someone on Medium Just Said C++ Was Better Than C (medium.com)

Developer David Timothy Strauss is publishing a call to code "straightforward, easy-to-reason-about approaches" -- in an essay titled "Choosing 'Some C++' Over C". (Alternate title: "C++ for Lovers of C." The problem with just picking C++ is that most criticism of it is legitimate. Whether it's the '90s-era obsession with object orientation and exceptions or the template errors that take up an entire terminal window, there have been -- and remain -- rough edges to C++. But, these rough edges are avoidable, unlike the problems in C that get worse with modern event and library programming. The opinionated essay calls for "adopting a subset of C++ to smooth out C's rough edges," arguing that C++ offer a better, type-safe approach for event-driven design (as well as destructors to avoid memory allocation leaks). Are there any readers who'd like to weigh in on the advantages of C versus C++?

Comments

Re:Actually what the guy wrote was

[Dutch Gun]

People who know and like C will continue to use it. Giant legacy projects written in C (like the Linux kernel) will continue to use C, of course. C++ 11, IMO, is not going to convince C programmers to switch. Rather, it's a love letter to existing C++ programmers due to the radical way it transformed the language.

It's still ugly as hell, and has sharp corners that will slice your fingers and toes off if you're not careful (we ARE talking C++ here). Even so, for the first time, using just the core language and libraries (Boost doesn't count), I can completely avoid manual memory management in 99% of the cases, almost like using a garbage collector, but with the advantages of destructors for non-memory resources. Raw pointers are almost a thing of the past, except for some very rare exceptions, and move semantics means your APIs can look like you always wanted them to while still remaining efficient. It's hard to describe how different the language feels pre and post 11.

In my opinion, C++ 11 simply makes C++ far better at creating large, high-performance libraries and applications (in my case, videogames) because of the confidence that robust ref-counted resource management gives you.