Edward C++Hands

http://bartoszmilewski.com/2013/09/19/edward-chands/

by T-zex • 13 years ago

251 228 13 years ago

fleitz• 13 years ago

Fucking backwards compatibility, let shitty code keep using shitty compilers while the rest of us move forward.

There comes a time when no one uses a feature anymore so it might as well be dropped. How many of you still have floppies on your computer?

simgidacav2• 13 years ago

The fact is that there's a very huge amount of legacy code which provides irreplaceable functionality. What would you do if you had a complex data crunching library in C to be integrated into your program?

Rewriting stuff from scratch is sometimes good, but usually you prefer to have some well-tested routines, and be sure they will not fuck up.

Edit: you may also argue that projects like LLVM make it possible to compile stuff in IR, and still keep the old code... but there may be situations in which choosing a different compiler is not an option.

CCs16• 13 years ago

Both CLang and GCC have "C++11 compatibility" switch, so it's a matter of a compiler parameter if they accept or not the new standard.

I would introduce a "backward compatibility" switch that has to be turned ON per source file to accept old constructs. All the new code from now own would be nice and shiny. There's an (easy) way to still keep around old code.

Would that work?

kzrdude• 13 years ago

Taking a C library and compiling it as C++ will negate the well-tested bit, since a totally different compiler is now interpreting the code.

gtani2• 13 years ago

Yeah, amongst all the "MS has lost its way" chatter recently, I don't think anybody noted how it's treating C++ devs. Annual full releases of VS? Really?

http://cpprocks.com/c11-compiler-support-shootout-visual-stu...

http://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/1h9uq7/c1114_stl_featur...

eliasmacpherson• 13 years ago

That STL link is the only thing that I learned anything from in this whole thread.

frozenport3• 13 years ago

I don't see any features that are completely unused. We had one called `auto` and its now gone. So what do you want to cut?

hvs• 13 years ago

Every time I look to use C++ for something, I come away with the knowledge that I will never know the right way to do it in C++. At least with C I know where I stand.

simgidacav2• 13 years ago

I think this is why, for instance, the Linux kernel is written in C and not in C++. And this leads to discussions on the Internet which are definitely funny! :D

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/520068/why-is-the-linux-k...

sp332• 13 years ago

That URL looks even funnier!

zvrba2• 13 years ago

I will never know the right way to do it in C++

IME, looking for a "right way" of doing anything requiring some kind of knowledge or technique is a tell-tale sign of inexperience. Pursuing the search, analyzing possibilities, weighing their trade-offs in the light of envisioned use-cases makes you better and more experienced.

Abandoning the search.. well, you'll certainly never get better.

This extends also to things like designing a LAN, database tables and relations, even to martial arts and sports.

zurn2• 13 years ago

Well put. It's like Perl but in self-denial - for each way to do it there's a bunch of people claiming it's the only right way to do it. And it changes every year.

CCs16• 13 years ago

Not an easy read for C++ fans like me, especially since it is coming from Bartosz Milewski.

I did try out several other languages and I keep coming back to C++11 for anything that requires scalability and raw performance, like APIs. The same basic server that gets 400 req/sec when implemented in C# ASP.NET achieves 7900 req/sec using C++.

So far I could not find a programming language that does not have similar (or worse) scissors. It's more like "pick your poison" type of choice.

After I learned Scala, my C++ code started to look like functional programming. According to Bartosz that's a good thing, and I did not have to dive into Haskell (yet). :)

wheaties• 13 years ago

I went C++ -> Python -> Scala. Still do Python. Don't do C++ anymore for the same exact reasons he mentions. The guy is a C++ hero and to hear him say those things means a lot. I encourage you to keep playing around with Scala. Have fund with the Actor model. Enjoy GC.

chetanahuja15• 13 years ago

"Enjoy GC."

Can't tell whether joking or serious. I guess my bitter laugh covers both cases.

CCs16• 13 years ago

We're in production with Scala since 2010 and for that use case it worked out pretty good. Not enjoying the GC at all, it is by far the biggest issue.

Also keeping an eye on Go and D, but not yet committed.

lttlrck• 13 years ago

Learning how to manage memory is a tiny fraction of the work involved in writing complex applications, and it's done upfront. Not having to worry about it would only give a proportionally tiny increase in 'enjoyment'.

16s3• 13 years ago

It's still my favorite language. I do respect his thoughts, but when I have systems programming to do, I'll take C++ over anything else any day, warts and all.

jaggederest3• 13 years ago

How many of your applications are actually getting 7900 requests per second though?

Optimize for effectiveness, not speed.

jaytaylor• 13 years ago

Furthermore, how optimized was the C#.NET version? C# will even let you drop into C++ if you want..I have a feeling the C# version may not have been tuned effectively.

CCs16• 13 years ago

7900 req/sec is on my laptop, first try without optimization - and we will need a lot more.

I know Disqus can serve up to 1M/server and they try to patch the Linux kernel to reach 2M. (Not exactly apples to apples since I use SQL transactions, but in the ballpark.)

The .NET never went over 440 request/sec on the server, not even with help from Microsoft. That means either C++ or using 2000 servers instead of the current 400 servers for every major deployment (hospital).

adamnemecek• 13 years ago

Let's hope that Rust takes off.

kibwen• 13 years ago

Indeed, this is exactly the niche that Rust is targeting: C++ performance without C++'s pitfalls. But it'll likely still be quite a while before it's battle-tested enough for everyday use.

Dewie2• 13 years ago

So far I could not find a programming language that does not have similar (or worse) scissors. It's more like "pick your poison" type of choice.

Ada? I've heard that it is very big on safety, and that it is in the C ballpark efficiency-wise.

CCs16• 13 years ago

Is there any company / product that uses it? (serious question)

I heard good things about many other "nice" languages, just nobody saw them in the wild, actually doing something useful...

MichaelGG4• 13 years ago

With C#, did you try using manual memory management? I wrote a rather high-performance (50K requests/sec, 550K ops/sec) daemon in F#. The big trick was to use my own mem management when it makes sense. I had a ~1GB managed heap, and 12+GB unmanaged.

For instance, you can stack-allocate many objects in C# (strings and arrays, for instance), if you're willing to give up the safety (and if C++ is an option, then you are willing). You can manually heap-alloc managed objects, too, although it gets tricky if they are nested objects. After all, the JIT is just taking pointers to objects and doing stuff with them - it doesn't care where the memory came from (just remember the GC won't scan your manually allocated stuff).

The CLR (unlike the JVM) has native capabilities built right into it. People should take more advantage of such things instead of only trying fully safe C# and then deciding to dump it all for no safety.

barrkel2• 13 years ago

I'm in violent agreement.

To avoid the costs of serialization and deserialization on a per-request basis, I built a little object system that stored all its instance data in a byte array. All internal references were offsets from the start of the array, but what made it fast was that I could read and write in it using raw pointers.

I then recycled the byte arrays to avoid GC pressure, as many were just over the edge of the large object heap, only collectable with gen2 scans.

I had a version working with manually allocated buffers, but it wasn't any faster - GC overhead was only 2% or so.

sitharus• 13 years ago

Do you have some pointers to your C# manual memory management techniques? I've seen a few, but none are particularly pleasant.

nly4• 13 years ago

What about resources other than memory?

zurn2• 13 years ago

We've come pretty far if without blinking it can be said that 8000 API calls per second is fast and you can get there only by using a language like C++, in 2013...

chetanahuja15• 13 years ago

Every time I read a "scathing" attack on C/C++ for being the worst language the author ever heard of, I hear Jack Sparrow's reply in my head "Ahh... but you have heard of me".

Somehow despite the litany of crippling deficiencies, C/C++ have managed to be the foundation of every piece of technology a consumer or a computer professional will ever touch in their daily life. But yeah, other than that, we should all be using.. oh, I don't know, scala or haskell or something like that.

cbp• 13 years ago

Why do you group C with C++?

chetanahuja15• 13 years ago

From the above-mentioned litany of deficiencies:

"You might think of the C subset of C++ as bona fide assembly language which you shouldn’t use it in day-to-day programming, except that it’s right there on the surface. If you reach blindly into your C++ toolbox, you’re likely to come up with naked pointers, for loops, and all this ugly stuff."

It's all rolled into one as far as the author is concerned.

nwmcsween• 13 years ago

C is not C++

jejones31412• 13 years ago

"Therefore moun we singen Deo Gratias."

frozenport3• 13 years ago

We know programming is not incremental, often what we did to get 70% of the requirements will be completely useless to achieve the remaining 100%. C++ will take you everywhere, and I find it a solid choice for any project especially because I am often unsure of performance requirements. I can confidently say my C++ code will scale.

tesseractive2• 13 years ago

Assembler will always scale too. The fact that something will always scale does not mean that it really is the proverbial golden hammer. Assuming that you will need scalability for any project regardless of what it entails is premature optimization.

There are also any number of cases where by using C++, you are missing the opportunity to use something more sensible. Some example use cases include data processing using massively distributed Hadoop installations, data analysis using Matlab/Octave or R, scripting using shell, perl, python, or ruby, and web client programming using JavaScript. I can't imagine web client programming counts among your "anywhere", but if you are doing all of these other things and doing them in C++, then I must ask why.

And in my personal experience[1], developer velocity has proven to be much higher in, say, Python than C++, and there are any number of use cases where rapid development is more important than scalability. Do you really find C++ to be the fastest language for a team to develop in (in your experience)?

[1] Warning -- anecdotal evidence directly ahead.

betterunix5• 13 years ago

"C++ will take you everywhere"

So will wire-wrap, but are you going to try wire-wrapping a word processing program? C++ is able to do anything that Lisp, Haskell, or Scala can do, but with at least an order of magnitude more work for any non-trivial project. That order of magnitude can make a difference in getting your project done at all.

"I can confidently say my C++ code will scale."

I can say the same about my Lisp code. In fact, I switched to Lisp to improve scalability over the original C++ codebase, because improving scalability required a higher-level approach. Sure, it could have been done in C++ -- which would have added at least a month of extra work, which I really cannot spare right now.

Scaevolus• 13 years ago

"There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses." -- Bjarne Stroustrup

cia_plant• 13 years ago

"Popularity is a good indicator of quality" -- Ronald McDonald

michaelwww8• 13 years ago

This quote reminds me of the US Navy saying I used to hear from officers: "A bitching sailor is a happy sailor." Sometimes, but more often sailors have real grievances that higher ups are choosing to ignore. I had a choice to re-enlist in the Navy and later with C++. Didn't happen with either.

j_baker2• 13 years ago

You're strawmanning.

The author clearly didn't say that C++ was the worst language he's ever heard of. He didn't necessarily even say C++ is a bad language. What I'm reading is more along the lines of "Ok sure, C++ was important at one point in time. But in 2013, we have lots of things to worry about that C++ doesn't help us with that other languages do help us with."

michaelwww8• 13 years ago

He conclusion is the C++ is obsolete and the power of new hardware capabilities is being squandered because of it. I'd call that 'scathing.' I'll always be fond of C++, but I hope I never have to use it again.

outside12343• 13 years ago

C++ is a legacy language. It was indeed good, about 20 years ago, and we can't shake it because it was good, about 20 years ago.

vinkelhake• 13 years ago

We can't shake C++ because for a number of things, there's still nothing better.

nly4• 13 years ago

Yep. A legacy language that underwent a major revision 2 years ago, with another coming next year, and another planned for 3 years time.

Someone• 13 years ago

Have you used it about 20 years ago? I think what we have now is way better than that.

Of course, what was there 20 years ago, language wise, still is there, but IMO that does not make it a legacy language. A language with legacy, yes, but it still is very much alive.

72deluxe• 13 years ago

I recently had to maintain C++ code from about 15 years ago. It is nothing like the new C++11. C++11 is a completely different beast, with many enhancements. Looks good - I recommend you read Stroustrup's C++11 book; if you are familiar with C++, the tour of C++ covers most of the new C++11 features.

CCs16• 13 years ago

C++ is a legacy language.

Based on which criteria? Citation needed.

betterunix5• 13 years ago

"C/C++ have managed to be the foundation of every piece of technology a consumer or a computer professional will ever touch in their daily life"

That has nothing to do with the technical merits of either language, and everything to do with a small number of early programmers' choice to use those languages -- which left us with a massive legacy codebase and an incentive to keep teaching people those languages. To put it another way, Unix is the reason C is popular and Windows is the reason C++ is popular. People who write software for Unix and Windows have compelling reasons to use C and C++, since every program ultimately needs to interact with the OS once in a while.

Every time someone brings up the crippling technical deficiencies of C and C++, someone responds with a point about C/C++ being popular. All that says is that technical merits are not necessarily a determining factor in language choice.

CCs16• 13 years ago

I think the actual argument was "C/C++ is not great, but others are worse". :)

Pretty much all languages have handy OS API calls, usually a lot more portable than C/C++ - so that's not a compelling reason.

Yet somehow a lot of new code is still written in C/C++: Redis, Memcached, Nginx, MongoDB, Android, Chrome etc

scythe• 13 years ago

Well, there is also the difficulty that there has not been, save Ada, a serious and concerted effort to replace C and C++ for so many of the things that they are used for. Except for Ada, no other modern language is suitable for writing things like kernels, drivers, emulators, etc; except for Ada, basically all modern languages are dependent on garbage collection.

So if you want to complain about C, remember that the only serious alternative is and has been Ada, and ask yourself why you're not using Ada, why operating systems and window managers, mupen64plus and Wayland, et cetera don't use Ada, and the truth is: people like C more than Ada.

Ada is the anti-C++. It's the answer to every criticism. It's also basically unheard of outside of situations where people really, really need safety cf. airline industry. In fact most of the people who complain about C++ would never even consider Ada. The author of the article seems to be unaware it even exists, which says a lot.

The takeaway is that safety is overrated, consistency is overrated, reliability is overrated, because if we really cared about these things... we'd use Ada. And we don't, because "Ada is annoying!".

pjmlp3• 13 years ago

Unix is the reason C is popular and Windows is the reason C++ is popular.

I never understood why people say C++ is popular because of Windows.

C++ was already popular before Windows mattered.

My first C++ applications were targeted at MS-DOS, back in the days most PC compatibles were still sold with 1 MB of RAM and almost no one has Windows installed.

Before Java was created, many of us were already doing C++ with CORBA in commercial UNIX systems.

Microsoft compilers only mattered to us around the time Windows NT started to enter the enterprise and the 32 bit version of Visual C++ was introduced.

C++ got popular due to its almost 100% C compatibility and as with C, UNIX also contributed to its spread in the enterprise, not Windows.

16s3• 13 years ago

"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses"

- Bjarne Stroustrup

graue2• 13 years ago

Heard that saying before, but didn't know it was from Stroustrup! That definitely adds to the hilarity.

In that case, let's hope Haskell and Rust move ever more solidly from the second group over to the first :) Always gonna be stuff to complain about. Doesn't excuse C++'s issues.

brudgers• 13 years ago

Edward Sissorhands is a tragic figure - tragic in the classical sense, the essence of his strength is the source of his weakness. Correct or not as a metaphor for cpp, that, not attack, is the author's theme.

I take the author to be issuing a warning that he wished he did not feel compelled to give, and that warning is that for some programming tasks which are increasingly becoming common the language beloved in his youth is feeling like a Turing tarpit.

Yes, with enough effort the relationship could be maintained, and for many people doing so makes sense for the sake of the kids, but for others like the author, the spark has died and there are younger more attractive "local girls who want to meet."

rybosome2• 13 years ago

Your point is correct, but it seems like a defensive stance. Rather than debating the technical facets of the article, you fall back on the ubiquity of C++ projects as an overwhelmingly positive aspect. For what it's worth, people say the same thing about PHP; how do you feel about that language?

It's hard reading vitriolic attacks on things you enjoy. There was a talk given by a Rubyist on why he thought Scala sucked, and I found it very irritating (and incorrect). So, that being said, I don't want to dismiss people feeling this way when the subject is broached. It would be nice to find a way to raise these points without ruffling feathers.

...but I think it should still be talked about. Times change, we learn lessons, life moves on. In spite of this, our most-used software is written using a language that is decades old. C+ is not a mathematical theorem...there is no universal truth to it that gives it a timeless quality. It's very common in the medical profession to rapidly change treatment methods - although a majority of the underlying knowledge is static, the actual techniques and tools change as better ones are discovered. In the realm of programming, can't we at least have the discussion?

I'm not advocating totalitarian FP. What I would love is for people to just take some of the biggest lessons learned and apply them. Hell, if I could just get immutability by default (we all know untamed mutability is dangerous), no untyped null (Hoare's billion-dollar mistake), and truly useful first-class functions (with everything that implies), I'd say that's enough to mollify me for the present. Thinking way, way, way forward, I would like to see people really studying and rethinking programming in general. Just because this is how we are doing this now doesn't mean it's the best way. "Normality" is sort of an accident - I'd love to see a more studied approach.

chetanahuja15• 13 years ago

The point I was making (somewhat sarcastically) is that the claims of deficiencies in C/C++ family of languages, such as they are, are way overblown. There are lots of problems with the model of course. The author is not the first person to express his utter dismay at the inelegance and crudeness (as they see it) of this model and won't be the last. They have seen the light. How can the others be so blind etc.

Meanwhile in the real world, every single computing device, billions of them, are working non-stop, days and weeks and months on end, on a foundation of millions and millions of lines of imperative code (mostly a combination of C/C++/java/ObjectiveC ). If this programming model was so horribly broken, so inadequate, so crude, how could mere humans have created such an enormously complex technological edifice on top of such shaky foundations?

fhd23• 13 years ago

Rather than debating the technical facets of the article, you fall back on the ubiquity of C++ projects as an overwhelmingly positive aspect. For what it's worth, people say the same thing about PHP; how do you feel about that language?

As Stroustrup fittingly said: "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses."

How can you know the downsides and warts of something you haven't used in a wide range of applications? Are you honestly saying there won't be any? Granted, an old, proven language will have far more warts than a fresh one that's still idealistic. Fixing old warts introduces new ones etc.

But I don't believe in the one true language.

mtdewcmu4• 13 years ago

For what it's worth, people say the same thing about PHP; how do you feel about that language?

I actually love how relaxed and non-pointy-headed PHP feels. They seem to have backed off and tried to remake the language as OOP now, which is sad.

signa11• 13 years ago

please don't club 'C' with 'C++' :)

detrino4• 13 years ago

His entire rant about resource management is misplaced. It's not that new/delete/pointers are "bad" or retained only for backwards compatibility, they are primitives from which other abstractions are built. I don't think its too much to ask professionals understand simple concepts such as RAII, which renders his entire example trivial.

phren0logy• 13 years ago

There was a time when I put more emphasis on what people should be able to do vs what they actually do. That time in my life has passed.

BartoszMilewski5• 13 years ago

I wouldn't have mentioned resource management at all if it weren't for Bjarne's keynote: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/2013/Opening-Key... . Apparently this is still not common knowledge.

detrino4• 13 years ago

This is the first thing that he says during his keynote:

"So, in the next couple of days you're going to hear a lot about the latest and greatest in C++, You're going to hear a lot about advanced techniques and new features. And I decided that in the keynote I couldn't go too much into that, so I'm going to do the opposite. I'm going to try and focus on what is the essence of C++. What is it that has been constant over the decades and what it is that that keeps C++ alive and kicking."

It was clearly framed as a history lesson about C++'s strengths, so I think it is a bit disingenuous to claim he was teaching resource management to a crowd of advanced C++ programmers.

CCs16• 13 years ago

Bartosz, Haskell was created 23 years ago, before Java. What is the reason it did not catch on yet? Will that change?

I'm not aware of any even mildly successful system that uses pure functional languages. Most of the implementations I know about is either C/C++/ObjC or JVM. Some Python (Youtube, Dropbox), one .NET (StackOverflow) and pretty much that's it. What do I miss?

[Edit] I'm looking for production code, not "in-house" or "internal tools". I did read trough http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_industry

chokolad• 13 years ago

Given that Bartosz wrote this http://relisoft.com/resource/resource.html somewhere around 1995 (and it is still relevant) I suspect Bartosz is well aware about RAII.

detrino4• 13 years ago

I never claimed otherwise.

AsymetricCom3• 13 years ago

I'd rather Edward than Samuel Boxingglovehands

rob05c2• 13 years ago

You would, but the person shaking Edward's hand would not.

To stretch the analogy, scissors are dangerous, but they're also very useful.

I prefer a language that lets me put away the scissors when I don't need them, so I don't cut someone's hand off. For example, Python with C bindings. The problem with C++, IMO, is that it doesn't let you put the scissors away.

AsymetricCom3• 13 years ago

Yes, much better to punch your users into submission so they don't even think of using their hands.

rob05c2• 13 years ago

C++: an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog. — Steve Taylor

http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/

sanskritabelt• 13 years ago

Whenever I see people comparing C to assembly I automatically assume they don't know anything about (a) C or (b) any kind of assembly.

nkurz3• 13 years ago

I think your 'or' might be misleading, with the (a) incidental and (b) required. I deal with a number of smart C (and even C++) programmers who view it as assembly with macros. But I've yet to meet any assembly programmers who view C as just a more succinct way to write assembly. Maybe it can be phrased as "Anyone who conflates C and assembly has probably never compared the output of their compiler with the code they think they wrote".

wwweston• 13 years ago

"Ask any C++ guru and they will tell you: avoid mutation, avoid side effects, don’t use loops, avoid class hierarchies and inheritance. But you will need strict discipline and total control over your collaborators to pull that off because C++ is so permissive.

"Haskell is not permissive, it won’t let you — or your coworkers — write unsafe code. Yes, initially you’ll be scratching your head trying to implement something in Haskell that you could hack in C++ in 10 minutes. If you’re lucky, and you work for Sean Parent or other exceptional programmer, he will code review your hacks and show you how not to program in C++."

For those who aren't familiar with Parent, watch this talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4moyKUHApq4

which introduced me to Stepanov's "Elements of Programming" and the idea that I could be working with better/more reliable/provable abstractions in C++.

That said... after a few weeks of shallowly digesting the material, I started thinking pretty much like Milewski says above: it's great if I can learn to write better C++, but if what I really want is to escape from its specific dangers and general common programming pitfalls, something like Haskell seems like a better bet.

njharman• 13 years ago

I looked at the banner and could think of nothing but "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."

I'm sorry and deserve to be downvoted.

fetbaffe4• 13 years ago

Me too!

dsego• 13 years ago

C++, the language programmers love to hate :) If you'd like to read some more C++ bashing: http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/

seanalltogether• 13 years ago

John Carmack wrote a very interesting post about this same topic. http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2012/04/26/functional-programm... To sum it up, he's still writing code in C++, but it has become less and less like C++. His code has become less OOP and more functional.

outside12343• 13 years ago

I think Linus sums up C++ pretty well:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/57643...

detrino4• 13 years ago

Do you think anything in that link is relevant to this article or did you just want to get in on the C++ bashing and had nothing to contribute of your own?

outside12343• 13 years ago

I think its relevant, honestly. C++ is a pile of hacks, layer upon layer, that only a small highly talented set of programmers can manage to master and the rest shoot themselves in the foot with. Linus says that in his own way, but that's the truth of the situation: C++ is a mess.

My takeaway from experience from all of that is to use C (as Linus argues).

austinz• 13 years ago

Regarding his assertion about reference counting: Apple's implementation of ARC for Objective-C doesn't handle cycles (it requires the engineer to reason about weak and strong references in order to prevent memory leaks), but it is certainly a "serious" implementation. The fact that it doesn't have facilities for detecting and releasing cyclic references makes it definitely not the "other side" of the GC coin.

That being said, ARC-style reference counting is more limited in terms of what developers can do with their code, and it may not be a general enough solution for a language like C++ (which strives to be all things to all people). Weak pointers in Objective-C also require runtime support, which could probably not be appropriate for high-performance applications in many cases.

lelandbatey• 13 years ago

Big side note, but C++ for me is just... too much. I come to C++ from Python, and they are just so far from each other it hurts. One of the fundamental things about Python that I loved was:

    "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it."

Meanwhile, the sage wisdom I heard learning C++ is:

    "C++ is wonderful because there are so many ways to do anything."

These two methods of thought fly right in the face of each other, and it's very hard to reconcile. With Python, I felt like I truly was learning a language, a language of action where doing any one thing was consistently defined. With C++ I feel like I'm in an ocean of choice and ambiguity, having to carry around this huge load of tribal knowledge to get anything done.

Not saying it's a bad language, just sharing my feelings on it.

16s3• 13 years ago

Reversing a string in Python is not obvious nor consistent:

    str[::-1]

While it is in C++:

    std::reverse(str.begin(), str.end());

And Ruby is even more obvious and consistent:

    str.reverse()

Most people who rag on C++ have never seriously used it. It's not that bad. Really, it isn't.

rictic• 13 years ago

That's one point against python, and half a point for C++ [1]. By my accounting that leaves the score still hugely in python's favor when it comes to obviousness and consistency.

Python vs Ruby is another subject entirely. Largely I feel like it's mostly a narcissism of small differences situation, and have only been doing more Python than Ruby lately because more people around me are Pythonistas than Rubyists at the moment.

1] ideally you wouldn't have to tell the reverse function the starting and ending points for the string unless you only wanted the reverse of a substring

zarify• 13 years ago

Well, there's always reversed(str) for Python (I realise this returns a reversed object and not a string object, which is something I dislike immensely).

I've always looked at [::-1] as being a bit of a hack, even though we use it all the time for both strings and lists.

knite• 13 years ago

How often do you need to reverse a string, or even a list?

yngccc• 13 years ago

that is little verbose, you can save a whole 7 characters.

  reverse(begin(str), end(str));

Tyr42• 13 years ago

Python 3 also has `reversed(str)`.

userulluipeste2• 13 years ago

You're right, C++ is like a huge load of tribal knowledge. It's not like a monolithic language, it is like a group of languages tied together, a swiss army knife if you will. Try take them gradually, in the order of their historical development: C with its preprocessor, then C++ classes with all their stuff, then generic programming (templates), and finally - in-depth stl. You may be told that it's best to start with stl because it was developed for (among other things) the beginners to avoid shooting themselves in the foot, but I find it to be just a coverage for higher-level programming (used best when you already know its under-the-hood low-level stuff).

codex• 13 years ago

The author now works for a Haskell company; perhaps this helps explain his changing attitudes towards C++. Or it could be a result of them.

limmeau• 13 years ago

Do you mean Corensic? Their homepage is now "under construction", according to Network Solutions.

BartoszMilewski5• 13 years ago

I did work for Corensic, which was bought by F5. It was a company that made a very ingenious data race detector. I learned a lot about data races and how they prevent companies from adopting concurrent programming.

I also used to work for a Haskell company, FP Complete, but I quit, so I'm no longer representing them. I learned a lot about building actual applications using Haskell at FP Complete.

millstone3• 13 years ago

The power of multicore processors, vector units, and GPUs is being squandered by the industry because of an obsolete programming paradigm.

It’s worth addressing these in turn. In reverse order:

I dispute that the C paradigm squanders GPUs. OpenCL and CUDA are the two most prominent languages written with GPUs in mind, and both have a lot more in common with C than with Haskell. In particular they eschew functional mainstays like recursion, linked lists, and garbage collection. So for GPUs, it seems like the ideal paradigm is closer to C than Haskell.

For vector units, there’s some recent excitement about auto-vectorization in Haskell. But I’m skeptical about the potential of auto-vectorization in general, since it only seems to apply to simple loops, and can’t take advantage of all instructions. Most effectively vectorized code uses either compiler intrinsics or outright assembly, and I don’t see that changing any time soon (I’d love to be proven wrong on this though).

Lastly, multicore processors. C++11 more or less standardized the creaky POSIX threading model, with some additions like thread locals - hardly state of the art. I wonder if the author is familiar with other approaches, like libdispatch, which provide a much improved model.

One last observation. Parallelism is not a goal! Improved performance is the goal, and parallelism is one mechanism to improved performance. If your Haskell program runs at half the speed of a C++ program, but scales to twice as many cores so as to make the overall time equal, that’s not a wash: it’s a significant win for C++, which did the same thing with half the resources (think battery drain, heat, other processes, etc.) Horse in front of cart.

lmm2• 13 years ago

I dispute that the C paradigm squanders GPUs. OpenCL and CUDA are the two most prominent languages written with GPUs in mind, and both have a lot more in common with C than with Haskell. In particular they eschew functional mainstays like recursion, linked lists, and garbage collection. So for GPUs, it seems like the ideal paradigm is closer to C than Haskell.

I think the more obvious explanation is that it's much easier to write a compiler for C than for Haskell. Thus the first tooling available for any new system is almost always C. It doesn't mean C's the best tool.

For vector units, there’s some recent excitement about auto-vectorization in Haskell. But I’m skeptical about the potential of auto-vectorization in general, since it only seems to apply to simple loops, and can’t take advantage of all instructions. Most effectively vectorized code uses either compiler intrinsics or outright assembly, and I don’t see that changing any time soon (I’d love to be proven wrong on this though).

We'll have to wait and see on this.

Lastly, multicore processors. C++11 more or less standardized the creaky POSIX threading model, with some additions like thread locals - hardly state of the art. I wonder if the author is familiar with other approaches, like libdispatch, which provide a much improved model.

My experience is that alternative approaches to something as fundamental as parallelism never take off, because they can't gather an ecosystem around them (I'm looking in particular at the chaos of approaches available in perl and especially python). I think a modern language needs to have a single, obvious, preferred way of achieving parallelism/concurrency that libraries can build on top of (and that's why javascript has been so successful - while it's a terrible language in many ways, there is one and only one way you handle parallel-type problems, and it's (slightly) better than the standard way in other languages)

eonil• 13 years ago

"It’s a common but false belief that reference counting (using shared pointers in particular) is better than garbage collection. There is actual research showing that the two approaches are just two sides of the same coin."

Yeah. But RC is at least deterministic and controllable side. Also, RC is just one of options of C++, while you can implement GC yourself in C++ without any overhead unlike any memory management method on GC.

pcwalton2• 13 years ago

Without compiler support for precise stack maps and barriers (and I don't know if it's actually possible to implement them, given how malleable pointers are in C++) the best you can do is conservative stop-the-world GC. That sacrifices a lot of performance over the incremental or concurrent GC algorithms you see in runtimes like the HotSpot JVM.

rwallace• 13 years ago

The article explained why RC is not deterministic.

millstone3• 13 years ago

RC is much more deterministic than GC. Garbage collectors commonly defer object deallocation until some threshold is reached, and then do it all at once. This means that two iterations of the same loop, that do the exact same thing, may take dramatically different amounts of time.

Reference counting is more stable and predictable, because the deallocation behavior depends only on the object graph in question, and not on some global state.

millstone3• 13 years ago

This jumped out at me too. I don’t think this point was carefully considered.

For example, the Linux kernel uses reference counting - see https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/kref.txt . Does anyone doubt that this mechanism is better than attempting to garbage collect the kernel?

general_failure2• 13 years ago

Brilliant, just brilliant. I found myself laughing and nodding all the way.

The sad situation is we have no worthy competitor. Go?

qznc2• 13 years ago

D [0], according to the author and me. Maybe Rust at some point.

Go is not flexible enough: Required garbage collection, no type-safe generic programming (yet), opinionated concurrency model.

[0] http://dlang.org/

copx2• 13 years ago

The H.264 encoder I use is written in a mixture of C and ASM. It is damn fast and maxes out all cores.

I dare you to write a full-featured, functional H.264 encoder in Haskell with equal or superior performance. Once such a thing exist I will start believing the hype.

Until then I reserve the right to consider the current Haskell/FP craze the biggest amount of bullshit since the Java/OOP craze.

Sorry people, I already know that magic language/paradigm which solves all problems of software engineering. Which allows me to write 4 times less code, said code being robust and maintainable practically by default, yet as fast as C/C++ if not faster, all that thanks to this great new model of software engineering! It is the (only) future!

Yes, the Java/OOP/design patterns/UML crowd made exactly the same bullshit claims back then. Nobody talks like that about Java/OOP anymore because the bullshit eventually hit the fan known as reality.

Oh and before Sun's viral marketing campaign there were the Lisp weenies. Again, same bullshit. We already have a "30x less code" language which comes bundled with an insufferable sense of intellectual superiority not backed by practical results.

Oh, and I almost forgot the Python/Ruby "dynamic" and "human" craze. "Programming for human beings" - it's the (only) future! Back then the snake oil addicts paraded around dynamic typing and code which read like plain English as the salvation of the programmer. Nowadays they claim dynamic typing is the software engineering equivalent of the Holocaust and that good code must look like math!

I am so tired of it..

effn• 13 years ago

So, any programming language incapable of beating a heavily tuned C/ASm h.264 encoder is bullshit?

copx2• 13 years ago

No, that wasn't my point at all.

My point was that I mistrust all braggart claims about how language/paradigm X will turn water into wine.

runT1ME• 13 years ago

The main micro blogging site I use is a mixture of scala, java, with ruby/iOS for the front end.

I dare you to write a fully featured, async web stack that handles many-core on the scale of hundreds of millions of users in C and ASM within equal or lesser man hours. Once such a thing exists i'll start believing the hype.

fhd23• 13 years ago

I see your point, comparing languages created for robustness and programmer productivity with languages created for raw hardware access and performance doesn't make much of a point.

However, C++ tries to be both, that's what's special about it. It's also arguably the cause of most of its problems and it's complexity, but that is what makes it powerful and useful - for certain applications.

The main micro blogging site I use is a mixture of scala, java, with ruby/iOS for the front end.

Twitter seems to use Scala for most of their backend (after growing too large for Ruby), but Google and Facebook (arguably operating at larger scale than Twitter) mostly use C++ there AFAIK.

chetanahuja15• 13 years ago

This challenge sounds a bit off because:

1) I'm struggling to wrap my head around twitter being cited as an example of software best practices.

2) How many man-hours are we talking about here? How do we get that data?

3) Once such a thing exists i'll start believing the hype. I think you got that the wrong way around. The "mainstream" programming world has always been imperative (C and C like language). The "hype" is the other way round, Scala/Haskell/Erlang will save us from certain doom etc.

harrytuttle• 13 years ago

BBC did this 15 years ago on tiny computers compared to now. They uploaded static HTML onto Sun boxes and served them.

If you did a submission somewhere, it'd do offline processing and upload new static pages.

Most of this was C and perl.

No Scala, no Java, no Ruby.

iOS does HTML too you know.

I agree with the OP - most of this new technology doesn't really solve any problems. All it does is create an ecosystem you can feel superior being a member of.

static_typed2• 13 years ago

You gloat, standing atop a hill of technologies, all implemented in C or C. Fundamentally you built your blog in C and C++, you just to do so indirectly, much more slowly by inserting JVMS and other bits in the way.

mtdewcmu4• 13 years ago

You're probably talking about layers above the web server, but, interestingly, nginx is pure C, async, and scales massively, and it's taking over the web. The creator of nginx is probably a genius, but still...

TheLegace2• 13 years ago

What happens when you compile your code into C, like how Vala is done, which now supports Python, Java and I think functional languages like Haskell and Clojure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QrGmA_RR4E

What happens when you can compile Python using LLVM for embedded targets like Cortex-M CPUs?

I like C as much as the next guy, but I know how deeply complex, verbose and difficult it can be to program and debug it.

I don't think Python is a craze, I think it's a fundamental philosophy to make a certain subset of computing more approachable and what is wrong with that.

I can do some very simple things in Python and it won't be overwhelming.

Just the building, linking, preprocessor process alone in C is what makes the language almost to difficult to use.

qznc2• 13 years ago

Which H.264 encoder is that? Would it be a feasable project to port it to D? Or maybe to Rust?

guygurari• 13 years ago

Until then I reserve the right to consider the current Haskell/FP craze the biggest amount of bullshit since the Java/OOP craze.

You make it sound as if the consensus following the 'Java/OOP craze' was that the naysayers had it right all along, and we should all go back to C/ASM. Well, it wasn't. Even though it was overhyped, I bet most developers (myself included) would still choose Java over C. Of course this means we would take a performance hit, but for the vast majority of jobs it wouldn't matter one bit.

At the tail end of most of these 'crazes' (Java, Python, Ruby, etc.), once the dust settled we ended up with something that is in many ways far superior to what came before it (certainly when compared with C).

mtdewcmu4• 13 years ago

I agree that C is rock solid. There's a reason it's the language of choice for large open source projects. There's no substitute for good programming.

Comparing Python and C is unfair, though. There's a right tool for every job.

Gupie• 13 years ago

C++ “solved” the problem of redundant casting and error- prone size calculations by replacing malloc and free with new and delete. The corrected C++ version of the code above would be: struct Pod { int count; int * counters; }; int n = 10; Pod * pod = new Pod; pod->count = n; pod->counters = new int [n]; ... delete [] pod->counters; delete pod;

The 'corrected C++ version of the code' is actually:

std:vector< int > pod( 10 ); ...

I didn't bother reading any further.

JanneVee3• 13 years ago

Yes, initially you’ll be scratching your head trying to implement something in Haskell that you could hack in C++ in 10 minutes. If you’re lucky, and you work for Sean Parent or other exceptional programmer, he will code review your hacks and show you how not to program in C++.

Don't underestimate "instant gratification" even when it comes to programming languages. Yes you might code yourself into a mess further down the line, but most of us are in the business of shipping software not worrying about its correctness.

chrisdone2• 13 years ago

I'd argue that Haskell (which is what I use professionally, can't speak for Scala) lets you write your less well designed code for shipping, and then refactor it later into something clean. There's a very low cost to changing code, so you worry less about getting it right the first time.

JanneVee3• 13 years ago

But in some cases like mine you have legacy code. You still have to ship new features and bug fixes. If I get to green field something really new, then Haskell or Scala might be on the table but currently they are not options. Not even embedding them.

static_typed2• 13 years ago

The problem is not that C++ is hard, it's that Haskell doesn't solve the same kind of problems.

We would all love programming to be easier, for the compiler or interpreter to just know what we really meant, rather than what we actually typed, but sometimes the tools are sharp, are a bit more manual, exactly because they offer more control.

The constant sell of Haskell or Go as the panacea for all programming problems is like someone else telling us all to adopt socks made of rubber - a few make like that, may even blog and evangelise about it, but the rest of us find it uncomfortable and annoying.

zvrba2• 13 years ago

But you will need strict discipline and total control over your collaborators to pull that off because C++ is so permissive.

Except it's not. The key is proper encapsulation into classes and generous use of private instance variables.

The real problem is social: people want to get something done quickly, so instead of talking to the original author[1], they put a new method in the class (or declare a friend) and happily continue hacking, without thinking of far-reaching consequences of whether unrestricted (that's what public is) use of the newly introduced method violates class invariants in some way.

[1] I'm aware that the original author might not be there anymore. Which makes a good case for documenting design and intent of the code. A QA matter.

How does Haskell solve the social problem (directly hacking something into a module you don't own or fully understand)?

What you don’t realize is that it will take you 10 years, if you’re lucky, to discover the “right way” of programming in C++

IMO, only novices and beginners look for "THE right way". Advanced people realize that the "right" way depends on the broad context and look for (the) best compromise solution among a spectrum of solutions.

I believe this holds for other computing-related things (designing a LAN, database tables, etc.), as well as real life (sports, martial arts, even everyday things like sitting and walking as any person who has had a lower back problem will tell you).

The problem is again social: novices and beginners who refuse to "grow up" and who know just enough to be dangerous: they can produce working but messy code, and refuse to learn other ways of doing the same thing in an appropriate context. (E.g. when to use while vs for, or why copy-pasting large chunks of code between different functions is generally "bad".)

Somehow I'm not convinced that Haskell is the magic bullet which solves the underlying social/human issues.

Haskell is not permissive, it won’t let you — or your coworkers — write unsafe code.

He never defines what "unsafe" is. Mutation is not unsafe per se.

Don’t be fooled: accessing atomic variables is expensive.

I've seen recent slides where the measured cost of an uncontended locked cmpxchg on Haswell was ~20 cycles vs ~5 cycles unlocked. This is NOT expensive, unless unnecessarily you replace all memory accesses with their atomic equivalents.

Most importantly though, threads are not a good abstraction for parallel programming

No, but they are an essential building block.

Haskell is way ahead of the curve with respect to parallelism

First, a computation can be abstraceted into a data dependency graph.

Now, the reason that most of today's applications don't benefit a lot from the vast number of processors available is not that the underlying programming is somehow unsuited for parallelism. It is because that there IS NO parallelism available in these applications: data dependency graph is mostly serial, and if parallelism is available, it is on such a small scale that superscalar CPUs already make use of the large part of it. Also, with overly fine-grained parallelism you WILL end up in a situation where the overhead of atomic operations becomes non-negligible, even if it is only ~20 cycles.

I believe that if people more often thought about their designs in message-passing terms, the dependency graph would also emerge, and they would see that there often is very little parallelism to extract through explicit parallelization. (Note that writing to a shared variable is just an extremely simple and efficient method of sending a message).

This was also remarked on by Knuth: During the past 50 years, I’ve written well over a thousand programs, many of which have substantial size. I can’t think of even five of those programs that would have been enhanced noticeably by parallelism or multithreading. [http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856]

So, IMO, easier coding for shared-memory parallelism is one of the worst reasons to switch programming languages.

That's why I personally prefer Erlang-style concurrency (actors). Communication patterns and parallelism granularity is explicit, and communication cannot be decoupled from synchronization. [With shared variables, these two are decoupled.]

roel_v• 13 years ago

I'd consider myself a 'C++ programmer' - I've used it for years, it works very well for me for what I do with it, etc. However, what I find most frustrating is that nothing is intuitive. And there is always a reason for why it is like that, I know. My favorite example is the erase/remove idiom.

Anyway, here is a question about C++. Last week I tried to implement a parser for a subset of CSV - one-byte-per-character, fields separated by comma, no quoting, fixed line ending. The only requirement was speed. So I started with a simple C++-style implementation, read one line at a time with std::getline, split with boost tokenizer, copy into vector of vector of string. But it was too slow, so I reimplemented it C-style - boom, first try, 30 times faster. Through some micro-optimisations I got it 30% faster still - copying less, adding some const left and right, caching a pointer. So if anyone is so inclined, how would I make the following more C++-ish and still get the same speed? Using fopen and raw char* to iterate over the memory buffer are what I'd consider the non-C++ aspects of it, but feel free to point out other idiom violations...

    bool CsvParser::OpenCStyle(boost::filesystem::path path)
    {
      FILE* fh = NULL;
      ::fopen_s(&fh, path.string().c_str(), "rb");
      if (fh == NULL) {
        return false;
      }

      const int BUFSIZE = 1024 * 256;
      char buf[BUFSIZE];

      m_Records.reserve(m_EstimatedRecordCount);
      bool at_end_of_file = false;
      std::string carryover_field_data;

      std::vector<std::string>* current_line = NULL;
      bool at_new_line = true;

      const char separator = m_Separator;

      while (!feof(fh)) {
        size_t size_read = ::fread(buf, sizeof(char), BUFSIZE, fh);
        char* start_of_field = buf;
        size_t i = 0;
        for (i = 0 ; i < BUFSIZE && i < size_read ; i++) {
          if (at_new_line) {
            m_Records.push_back(std::vector<std::string>());
            current_line = &m_Records.back();
            at_new_line = false;
          }
          if (buf[i] == separator || (at_new_line = (buf[i] == '\n'))) {
            current_line->push_back(std::string());
            if (carryover_field_data.size() != 0) {
              std::string field(start_of_field, &buf[i] - start_of_field);
              m_Records.back().push_back(carryover_field_data + field);
              carryover_field_data = "";
            } else {
              current_line->back().assign(start_of_field, &buf[i] - start_of_field);
            }
            start_of_field = &buf[i + 1];
          }
        }
        carryover_field_data = std::string(start_of_field, &buf[i] - start_of_field);
      }

      fclose(fh);

      return true;
    }

JanneVee3• 13 years ago

As for your getline being slow. It is a known problem.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9025093/stdcin-really-slo...

xerophtye3• 13 years ago

C++ Novice Question: Why are for loops bad? (as mentioned in the article). What's the alternative?

BartoszMilewski5• 13 years ago

You should use standard algorithms whenever possible. Sean Parent talked about it at Going Native. He was able to transform a horrible set of for loops he found in Google's code into a few lines of modern C++ using standard algorithms. But he _is_ Sean Parent!

MichaelMoser123• 13 years ago

Haskell is creating a new value for every parameter / function return value; That means that even for trivial tasks it is churning over non trivial amounts of RAM; the footprint of a Haskell program is therefore rather large; I guess that makes it rather impractical for real systems.

But of course, this one is an interesting observation: "If nature were as serious about backward compatibility as C++ is, humans would still have tails, gills, flippers, antennae, and external skeletons on top of internal ones — they all made sense at some point in the evolution."

I guess C++ is like Perl: for many things there is more than one way to do a thing; Don't like exceptions? Disable during compilation and code as in C with error codes; That's what makes the whole thing malleable; the right kind of flexibility is a winning feature.

mtdewcmu4• 13 years ago

"...avoid class hierarchies and inheritance..."

I love hearing this from OOP insiders. Virtual functions are particularly awful to track down, and are probably worse than GOTO ever was. At least GOTOs only went to one place.

cLeEOGPw• 13 years ago

If he replaced "int * _counters;" with "vector<int> _counters;" he would have lost nothing and gained a lot of control. As for the pointer to the Snd object itself, in many cases it is sufficient to create object, not pointer, and pass the reference of the object, then in case of exception memory is always freed no matter how many ints he has push_back'ed and where the exception occurred. And if he really needs to have pointer, then he should create that pointer not in naked function that could return at any time, but make it a member of a class and delete the pointer in destructor. Then make that class as object, which will always execute its destructor, therefore always freeing the memory.

Edward C++Hands

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