C++ - The Forgotten Trojan Horse

http://ejohnson.blogs.com/software/2004/11/i_find_c_intere.html

by silentbicycle • 17 years ago

38 38 17 years ago

ejohnson.blogs.com

noss• 17 years ago

Look at all that comment spam. How lovely.

InkweaverReview• 17 years ago

Yeah.

Great post, but the comment spam shows that this site isn't very well maintained. Clearly the author hasn't spent much time on it in a long time.

Too bad.

aurora72• 17 years ago

It's been a long time since the last time I saw spam in a blog. Totally embarrasing.

francoisdevlin• 17 years ago

This should be required reading for anyone trying to push a new language in a Java/C# shop. Don't fight the platform, instead, leverage it to your advantage.

kqr24• 17 years ago

Linus Torvalds thoughts on C++:

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

dkarl3• 17 years ago

Those aren't his thoughts. Those are his thoughts morphed into a flame meant to stop people from bugging him about a particular decision he made that he believed was correct and didn't want to revisit ad nauseam.

kqr24• 17 years ago

Can someone post a link to his actual thoughts on C++?

kingkongrevenge2• 17 years ago

I couldn't find any useful information in that thread. A couple C aficionados basically scream they don't like C++ and baselessly claim it has performance and portability problems.

sutro• 17 years ago

This is the same strategy that Clojure is now using, which is why it's the only LISP that has any chance of going mainstream.

kqr24• 17 years ago

I don't think Clojure uses the same "trojan horse" strategy, i.e. it isn't a superset of the Java language with Lisp extensions.

It does use the Java virtual machine, however, which allows it to use existing java libraries.

dkarl3• 17 years ago

Implementing Java interfaces and subclassing Java classes does allow Clojure programmers to introduce Clojure into a Java organization without forcing the Java programmers to accommodate them in any special way.

(That is, as long as Clojure code can be deployed easily as jars, and as long as Clojure doesn't create any special classloader problems because of its runtime system. Those are problems that bit me hard when I used Jython code in the Eclipse plugin framework, and I imagine any dynamic language might accidentally create classloader problems unless it was specifically designed to avoid them.)

ajross• 17 years ago

Always useful reading for anyone who thinks C++ is great and can't understand all the curmudgeons who think otherwise:

http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/defective.html

The rest of the FQA site is good too, but the summary is the best enumeration of all the brain damage.

old-gregg• 17 years ago

Believe me, those who truly believe that C++ is great, consider some of those deficiencies to be advantages.

It helps to remember, that C and C++ don't exist on an "VM island", i.e. as an isolated process, like all high-level programming languages do. They are effectively extensions of UNIX-derived operating systems, i.e. they run under "UNIX VM". They even have a garbage collection of sorts: when you exit the program, the memory gets freed. And, according to Linux philosophy, launching processes or forking/dying should be quick, efficient and, in fact, desirable. Also, having many independent binary modules is the norm, so here is your runtime encapsulation.

But C family is still the only tool out there that allows you to extend an OS, i.e. for instance to build a piece of code, a single instance of which will be serving all other simultaneously running processes. This explains why Apache eats so little RAM. None of VM-based languages can do that. It's called systems programming.

Building a web-based CRM in C++ is stupid. Building a filesystem in Python is impossible.

ilyak• 17 years ago

It's nginx that eats so little RAM. Apache is a huge!

kqr24• 17 years ago

You wouldn't build a low level filesystem in Python, however, Tahoe is a distributed file system built using python:

http://allmydata.org/~warner/pycon-tahoe.html

thras3• 17 years ago

I don't know. Every time RoR slows down under barely any load, I swear to myself that I'm going to right C++ on Rails and do it right.

kingkongrevenge2• 17 years ago

It's amusing how people attack C++ from both directions. You get the main article apparently complaining that C++ isn't retarded simple and verbose like C. Then you also get people like in this link basically complaining that C++ isn't Lisp.

Allow me to clarify: C++ is a replacement for C. C code rewritten as C++ will almost always be shorter and the same speed. The structure and function of the code will also tend to be clearer in C++.

makecheck4• 17 years ago

C++ has a high price in terms of binary incompatibility. Its mangling is (still) complex and fairly non-standard across compilers, which means that libraries are unusable unless you know how they were built and have built them all consistently. Plain C libraries, however, are generally plug and play.

To put up with the pain that is C++ mangling (which I sometimes do), I need to be using major features of C++. If you're only using C++ to make shorter, prettier code that could just as easily be C, you're creating an unnecessarily fragile binary.

Clearly C++ has its advantages, I'm just saying that you should require a lot of those features before accepting it as a language. This is especially true now that C has been absorbing some of the advantageous features of C++, such as inlining.

siim2• 17 years ago

OK, picked one random whine:

"When an invalid program finally crashes (or enters an infinite loop, or goes to sleep forever), what you're left with is basically the binary snapshot of its state (a common name for it is a "core dump"). You have to make sense of it in order to find the bug."

If you write an invalid program... Then you are doing it completely wrong! (http://lemonodor.com/archives/2007/10/youre_doing_it_wrong.h...)

There are two types of peope: those who belive what they read and those who want to try out their own and then read and after that whine or ... :)

huhtenberg2• 17 years ago

> OK, picked one random whine:

The whole list is a one big whine that in parts is staggeringly clueless. It reads like its author has challenged himself to come up with as many "Defective" or "Very complicated" items as he could just for the sake of making the list looooong.

thras3• 17 years ago

This article is silly. The real reason for the rise of C++ is that "C with Objects" fit the metaphors that GUI libraries need a lot better than C.

And in the end...it's not such a bad language. In the real world, you only use a small part of it on any one project. In the real world, your framework or libraries matter more than the language anyway. And in the real world, performance always matters in the end.

adamc2• 17 years ago

I don't agree on the last. In the "real world" that I am familiar with, performance is often irrelevant. Lots of programs get written that don't need to run fast or don't do enough work for performance to be an issue.

thras3• 17 years ago

Well, if we're talking "programs" as opposed to administration glue scripts, I see very few fields where performance doesn't matter. It matters for online apps. It matters for GUI applications. It matters for games. It matters for scientific software. Operating systems. Embedded apps. I suppose there are some enterprise business niche software fields somewhere where it doesn't matter -- until someone decides to write some competing software and sell it, that is.

quizzical• 17 years ago

This article is equating anything that is feature rich and highly competent to being a Trojan Horse. If so, then bring on the horses!

C++ - The Forgotten Trojan Horse

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