Is C++ the Language of the Future?

http://claystuart.blogspot.com/2012/01/language-of-future-is-c.html

by jemeshsu • 14 years ago

29 40 14 years ago

claystuart.blogspot.com

icefox• 14 years ago

Smudge• 14 years ago

That was my reaction too. I like your brevity.

ootachi5• 14 years ago

No Scala or Rust? Especially Rust seems like it fits the author's wishlist.

demallien• 14 years ago

Ahhh, He started talking about needing concurrency to be able to make use of multicode CPUs, and his solution is C++ ??? The number of cores is multiplying with Moore's Law. It doesn't take many multiplications before a language able to easily make use of those multicores efficiently will blow past C++ in performance.

angersock7• 14 years ago

So, before you rush off to dismiss C++, note a very important thing:

With reference-counted smart pointers, you can guarantee that objects immediately go away once they leave scope, and that you can pass them around between threads without worrying too much about a thread forgetting to delete them. No other language has such easy support for doing something like that without relying on a background memory-management mechanism (at least that I'm aware of--I'd like to hear about it if you know one!).

mrich2• 14 years ago

Objective-C with ARC comes pretty close.

ootachi5• 14 years ago

Well, you have to make sure that you use atomic reference counting in this case. Using regular reference counting will lead to subtle and hard-to-diagnose bugs.

Also, to answer your query, Rust uses unique pointers (the equivalent of std::unique_ptr in C++0x) for inter-thread communication. When the unique pointer goes out of scope, its memory is immediately freed (since it was the only owner of the data). And since the data has only one owner, it's data-race-free.

pmjordan2• 14 years ago

Reference counting is nothing new. Visual Basic used it before the transition to .NET. Python uses it, if I remember correctly (with occasional GC to avoid leaks due to cycles). There are probably countless other examples.

Reference counting is also not even that great for shared memory multithreading. The (atomic) increment/decrement operations typically cause lots of cache invalidation, so you'll get a slowdown even for immutable objects.

mrich2• 14 years ago

Modern C++ code is multithreaded, threading is now finally part of the standard. While C++ is showing its age, and the refusal to cut any old features at all sure is no advantage, it is still the language to beat for performance and especially memory usage.

rbanffy5• 14 years ago

The problem is not the ability to start threads - it's enabling the programmer to express the problems in concurrent form.

espeed• 14 years ago

Go is a strong candidate because of its concurrency model.

angersock7• 14 years ago

(the inclusion of Ada and the dismissal of go as "not having objects" makes me question the author's wisdom)

C++ is likely to be the language of the future, as it is getting to the point where you can pick a subset of the language and emulate your favorite other programming language and paradigms.

This is not a good thing.

wicknicks• 14 years ago

Exactly! This has been my concern too. Everybody has their pet subset of the language. With the amount of native features growing with every standard, large C++ codebases look more polyglot than ever.

rbanffy5• 14 years ago

Indeed. There are probably a dozen people in the planet that understand C++ completely. They all maintain compilers.

numeromancer• 14 years ago

(Note: I define "serious development" as rock solid, enterprise quality software)

This guy must be good; I've been looking for the source code for the systems of the U.S.S Enterprise for months now on The Pirate Bay, and still haven't found it.

ALSO: I didn't know that this was an Object Oriented world! Ya lern sumthin new evry day.

Squirrel!

j_baker• 14 years ago

I think this post is a non-sequiter. I think the observations the author is making are accurate, but I don't think that any of them but #2 really make a strong case for C++. And even that one is debatable.

lopatin• 14 years ago

What are the chances a coffeescript-like language for c++ being adopted? I would think that a python like syntax, with utility methods and such, that compiles to c++ would be a huge help if c++ really is going to be adopted more and more in the future.

phamilton• 14 years ago

Why compile to c++?

Compiling to javascript makes sense because javascript is the lowest common denominator for browsers.

Compiling to c++ wouldn't make any sense when you can compile directly to assembly/bytecode.

It would be like writing a python like language that compiled to coffeescript. It would be silly not to compile it directly to javascript.

qdog2• 14 years ago

I would think compiling to llvm is probably a better road to go down than compiling to c++, as long as llvm can target the platform you are interested in. C++ could link against your library then. And you could probably do it right now.

eco• 14 years ago

Interestingly, the original C++ compilers were like CoffeeScript in that they'd compile to C source code. Walter Bright (now of D fame) wrote the first C++ compiler that compiled to machine code. I don't really see this as the approach going forward though. There isn't much to gain from compiling to C++ code over C code.

rbanffy5• 14 years ago

Why not go the rpython or Cython route? Both have the Python syntax and compile to C.

Not very readable C, of course, but not significantly worse than what the first C++ preprocessors did (yes, kids, C++ started its life as a compiler that compiled C++ code into horribly mangled C).

krisc• 14 years ago

If the JVM persists into the future, I see Clojure as a strong candidate.

qdog2• 14 years ago

No mention of several other languages, like Erlang, which more or less scales up with available hardware threads.

However, it doesn't even mention that just having multiple cores on a chip isn't the same thing as having 2 chips, you still have shared memory and the bus, so having 2 cores is not going to be as fast as having 2 chips and 2 sets of memory in most cases, so adding cores is never going to be a linear increase. I believe right now that intel's hyperthreading needs to be turned off for some compile scenarios, as the collisions are too high either for memory or something else (at least 2 people I know who have to do huge compiles disable some of the hyperthreads).

In short, I don't believe it's easy to just scale up on multi-core systems, regardless of language. Threads are a pretty dangerous way to do things, processes are much safer, but not all problems fall easily into a parallel model.

aninteger• 14 years ago

Why would the language of the future be any one specific language? Many languages can make use of multiple cores through threading/open-mp like libraries.

olaf• 14 years ago

I think, the question is wrong, because of Browsers/Javascript. Not much C++ in sight there, for scripting Browsers/DOM. Even Stroustrup mentioned JS as one of the programming languages programmers should know.

rbanffy5• 14 years ago

> (Note: I define "serious development" as rock solid, enterprise quality software)

This guy must be right. I don't see why my opinions should matter because, according to him, I haven't done any rock solid enterprise quality software since 2002 or so. I sure must warn my clients my software isn't up to the current standards of quality, for they rely on my "lesser" solutions.

Am I the only one who is sick of this kind of arrogance?

bediger4000• 14 years ago

First, why C++? Given that you can't truly do threading via a library (http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/950 Lambda-the-ultimate thread for context, and pointers to various versions), it would seem that C++ is not a good choice.

Second, why not assembly of some sort, or something very close to assembly? It's hard to break things out into threads and not incur performance problems due to platooning or thundering herds or contention for critical section(s). You want to maximize each individual CPU's work even in a massively multi-processor environment. Assembly gets you performance, guaranteed atomic operations, guaranteed memory barriers. and precise locations of those things.

I smell a return to the "semantic gap" and highly orthogonal ISAs.

tomp• 14 years ago

Whenever I read such an article, I'm amused at how the authors seem to forget that there exist multiple areas of programming: web programming, application programming, industrial programming, real-time programming (finance), ...

C/C++ is popular only in the application programming and possibly industrial programming category. I believe that the latter category will become increasingly popular/important in the future (robotics, space travel, even consumer gadgets are becoming "smarter"), and C is a really bad language for any kind of life-critical software, mainly because it cannot be statically analysed (without significantly restricting the language features). Another thing is, in embedded systems, there's much less legacy code, so a new language for that field could very easily win over any existing ones.

pork• 14 years ago

Sorry, which (widely used) language out there can be statically analyzed without restricting language features? And being difficult to statically analyze is hardly a reason to switch to C++.

rbanffy5• 14 years ago

I can't see why being able to statically analyze the code brings it any closer to correctness - all it says is that you got your types right. In fact, switching to a lower-level language (as in "more detached from the problem you are trying to solve" such as C or C++) seriously harms your ability to even produce correct code.

Anyone who has chased a time-sensitive bug caused by data structures that mutate unexpectedly (be it by conflicting threads, be it by hardware changing it) can tell you that getting the types right won't help you a bit with making code that runs correctly on multi-core machines.

drucken• 14 years ago

Languages of the future will be written to VMs.

The languages on top of the VMs will evolve fast while the VMs become progressively broader in scope.

It has already happened for many languages and is already a route companies like Apple have and are investing heavily into, e.g. Clang.

Bleeding edge examples include Rust (http://www.rust-lang.org/) and Clay (http://claylabs.com/clay/) both on the LLVM.

Is C++ the Language of the Future?

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