The New C++: Lay down your guns, knives, and clubs

http://m.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/11/herb_sutter_next_c_plus_plus/

by jemeshsu • 15 years ago

56 37 15 years ago

m.theregister.co.uk

<tl;dr> C++0x is pretty nice. </tl;dr>

But ultimately, as long as it lacks memory safety, it lives in a mostly parallel universe from Java and everything else. It's not really becoming more Java-like. It's becoming more C++-like. C++0x goes in the direction of having better support for existing C++ idioms.

lutorm• 15 years ago

it lives in a mostly parallel universe from Java and everything else

So the top 3 programming languages are Java, C, and C++, with C/C++ together larger than Java. Maybe it's Java that lives in a parallel universe?

kleiba• 15 years ago

I don't get your point. If A lives in a parallel universe from B, then B lives in a parallel universe from A.

I think what the grandparent wanted to say is that memory management is a defining difference between the paradigms of both languages. There are some people who value the fact that they have full control over allocation and de-allocation and others who think that these are things the programmer shouldn't (have to) care about, because they're known to be error prone.

cageface2• 15 years ago

I've always imagined Herb Sutter as a Gandalf-like figure and here he is looking like a partner in a New York law firm. I guess it is possible to achieve guru status without a beard.

I can't wait to get support for the "auto" keyword in XCode.

jpr• 15 years ago

Apparently he has had a mustache, so no guru status without facial hair yet:

http://www.xb360info.com/images/herb_sutter.jpg

Luyt• 15 years ago

Ha, you should have seen Alex Martelli while he still had a moustache: http://images-mediawiki-sites.thefullwiki.org/05/3/0/3/32378...

nl• 15 years ago

Interestingly, C++ was ratified as an ISO standard just as Java failed to get ISO pick-up after a campaign by Sun

Actually, even more interestingly, Java failed to become an ISO standard because Sun didn't want it (at the time they were worried about the potential influence of Microsoft).

reedF211• 15 years ago

Garbage Collection, Garbage Collection, Garbage Collection, where is garbage collection?

yonilevy3• 15 years ago

C++0x introduces a bunch of smart pointers to the standard library (and boost provides them externally for previous versions). What are the advantages of garbage collection over these?

barrkel3• 15 years ago

The mere fact that you have to use smart pointerS is enough of a drawback; not only do you need to start decorating various types explicitly, but you must choose which smart pointer types are appropriate, and avoid issues of circular references (in the case of refcounting) and persistence of references (in the case of scope-guarded objects tied to a stack frame); worry about logical ownership hand-off from one smart pointer container to another, etc.

The real power of GC, though, is freedom to use idioms that are simply impractical, or especially, not exception safe, in its absence (see my comment earlier).

Rexxar• 15 years ago

It's really not such a big deal if you use "new" parsimoniously and use containers and RAII as much as you can.

I can count on my hands the number of new and delete I have written in my code in the last three years.

barrkel3• 15 years ago

It's rather harder to count the number of times there were idioms you could have used but didn't because using them in C++ wouldn't have been practical or efficient. I'm thinking in particular of closures which captured state, and functional/monadic style chained method calls each building on the previous function's return value (think: something like .NET LINQ).

cageface2• 15 years ago

First, it's a bit late to bolt this on to the language now that mountains and mountains of libraries and applications have been written to use manual memory management.

Second, a lot of people use C++ because they need low-level control of memory use and can't tolerate GC pauses. If you're writing the kind of app in which GC is acceptable why not use Java or an even higher level language like Scala instead?

sien• 15 years ago

In languages where it's appropriate.

Not in those where being close to the metal matters.

X-Istence• 15 years ago

Left out, which IMHO is a good thing. The C++ language as it stands right now, especially with the C++0x additions has provided plenty of new features that are going to help developers build amazing software with more power.

Not everyone wants or needs garbage collection and it would be a downright pain to bolt it on now.

Feel free to use one of the umpteen other programming languages that does provide garbage collection, clearly if you are complaining about that you are simply using the wrong tool for the job.

gte910h• 15 years ago

C++ has garbage collectors. They're just not standard:

http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/

http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/libgc.html

http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2005/n183...

hendler• 15 years ago

"... the Apache MapReduce clustered data-processing architecture ..." I'm not very familiar with internals of Hadoop - but thought this was mostly Java.

DannoHung• 15 years ago

Doesn't change the fact that the C++ design is a giant ball of mud.

CountHackulus2• 15 years ago

Care to back up that statement? Can you explain how objects and patterns in C++ make the design worse than objects and patterns in another language?

cousin_it2• 15 years ago

Here's a list of what seem to me, in hindsight, to be the biggest mistakes in the design of C++:

1) Header files. They don't improve your code or your build process in any way, they just make you retype everything twice and make the compiler reprocess everything as many times as it's included. There's no reason why even a low-level language today can't have a module system like Java's, where everything is typed in and compiled only once.

2) Having exceptions without having garbage collection. Having both of these, or none of these, would have been OK, but having one and not the other makes writing exception-safe code unnecessarily difficult. It took people years to write the first correct exception-safe container class and understand all the tricky leaks that can happen. See Tom Cargill's 1994 article: http://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/imprint_downloads/informit/aw... and Herb Sutter's failed answer in 1997: http://www.gotw.ca/gotw/008.htm .

3) The template mechanism is too general and not a good fit for many of the tasks that people are trying to solve with it. Easy tasks like parameterized container types would've been better solved with a simpler mechanism like Ada generics (no specialization, no implicit instantiation, only one copy of object code, possible to compile separately). Harder tasks should be solved with purpose-built mechanisms, e.g. if you really need lambda, build it into the language. Faking lambda with templates isn't much better than faking it with preprocessor macros.

4) Strings should've been built in, and done right. There must be only one string type (Unicode). All string literals must be instances of that type. No null-terminated strings anywhere, they're a very bad default. If your application demands shaving a couple cycles from operations on character buffers, you can always use custom code.

I'm not asking for garbage collection, multithreading, GUI toolkits or any other fancy features. C++ could've gotten these five things right and still be a very good fit for all the bare metal speed hackery that people want.

wglb2• 15 years ago

Check out http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/ (C++ Frequently Questioned Answers), particularly Defective C++ http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/defective.html, and most interestingly Undecidable Grammar at http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/defective.html#defect-2.

openbear• 15 years ago

The polite way of saying that is "view C++ as a federation of languages" ;-) Meyers, Scott. 1997. Effective C++. Addison-Wesley.

nuttendorfer• 15 years ago

Can somebody recommend a good C++ book without all the new to programming parts?

CountHackulus2• 15 years ago

If you really want to dive straight into the deep end, I'd recommend Modern C++ Design by Andrei Alexandrescu. But if you want just a gentle introduction to C++ I'd suggest The C++ Programming Language by Bjarne Stroustrup.

Both of these authors are staples in the C++ world and so their advice is usually worth their weight in gold.

btilly• 15 years ago

http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/ is surprisingly useful. And free.

kenjackson• 15 years ago

Yes, the following I recommend:

Advanced C++. http://www.amazon.com/Advanced-C-Programming-Styles-Idioms/d...

Any and all Herb Sutter books.

Effective C++, More Effective C++, and Effective STL ... all by Scott Myers.

With those you're 90% set. What you'll need to supplement with thoough is something that covers the 0x standard.

ajays• 15 years ago

FTA: "the Apache MapReduce clustered data-processing architecture, ... is written in C++"

Really? Hadoop is pure Java.

hello_moto• 15 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, HDFS is written partially in C.

revertts• 15 years ago

Yeah, that caught my eye too. I assume they just got Hadoop mixed up with Google's C++ MapReduce implementation.

wglb2• 15 years ago

I have a lot of respect for Herb Sutter--his articles on difficulty of multiprogramming are worth study by all. But there is an element of Kool-aid in his comments about other languages. Hadoop is written in Java; much of the world is written in C, and in very restricted versions of C++. I say this as one who did 10 years in industrial-strength C++ programming.

If you look at C++ without rose-colored glasses, it is a pretty frightening prospect. Modern C++ Design by Andrei Alexandrescu is a very awesome book, but the fact that there are surprises in it for Scott Meyers should give the student pause.

And to all of you who are beginning programming, you will be better off in the long run if you become proficient in several languages. I predict that in your successful career you will be ahead if you are able to pick up new languages rapidly. Time spent mastering C++ might not be the best use of your learning budget.

The New C++: Lay down your guns, knives, and clubs

Related Stories