On Thursday, 11 September 2014 at 20:55:43 UTC, Andrey Lifanov
wrote:
Everyone tells about greatness and safety of GC, and that it is
hard to live without it... But, I suppose, you all do know the
one programming language in which 95% of AAA-quality popular
desktop software and OS is written. And this language is C/C++.
Because due to the way the market changed in the last 20 years,
compiler vendors focused on native code compilers for C and C++,
while the
others faded away.
How do you explain this? Just because we are stubborn and silly
people, we use terrible old C++? No. The real answer: there is
no alternative.
There used to exist.
I am old enough to remeber when C only mattered if coding on UNIX.
Stop telling fairy tales that there is not possible to program
safe in C++. Every experienced programmer can easily handle
parallel programming and memory management in C++. Yes, it
requires certain work and knowledge, but it is possible, and
many of us do it on the everyday basis (on my current work we
use reference counting, though the overall quality of code is
terrible, I must admit).
Of course, it is possible to do safe coding in C++, but you need
good coders on the team.
I always try to apply the safe practices from the Algol world, as
well as, many good practices I have learned since I got in touch
with C++ back in 1993.
My pure C programming days were coffined to the Turbo Pascal ->
C++ transition, university projects and my first job. Never liked
its unsafe design.
Now the thing is, I could only make use of safe programming
practices like compiler specific collections (later STL) and RAII,
when coding on my own or in small teams composed of good C++
developers.
More often than not, the C++ codebases I have met on my projects
looked either C compiled with a C++ compiler or OOP gone wild.
With lots of nice macros as well.
When the teams had high rotation, then the code quality was even
worse.
A pointer goes boom and no one knows which module is responsible
for doing what in terms of memory management.
We stopped using C++ on our consulting projects back in 2005, as
we started to focus mostly on JVM and .NET projects.
Still use it for my hobby coding, or some jobs on side, where I
can control the code quality though.
However, I am also found of system programming languages with GC,
having had the opportunity to use the Oberon OS back in the
mid-90's.
--
Paulo
