Re:Ask HN: Best way to learn modern C++?
by pjmlp on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @01:36PM
(#16538626)
I don't see a free download as being enough.
At very least, there needs to exist painless interoperability with the SDK toolchain, debugging tools, IDE, platform libraries.
Every piece of the puzzle that doesn't quite work like the SDK tools, means additional development/debugging effort.
Naturally the big question is always if the added benefit of using language X outside the expected workflow outweighs the extra development costs.
Just look at C++, it was on the path of being widely adopted by desktop OSes, every C compiler vendor was adding support for it.
Then BSD and Linux large scale adoption happened with GNU manifesto favouring C as the language to write portable software, Java and .NET came into the scene.
Microsoft was probably the only major OS vendor still caring about it, until LLVM happened and the wind started blowing again with C++11.
The embedded space is still an area where C++ is hardly seen, with a few conference talks last year discussing on how to advocate for it.
Now all major C compilers are written in C++, but had Microsoft focused only on .NET or LLVM never happened, and history would probably followed another path.
At very least, there needs to exist painless interoperability with the SDK toolchain, debugging tools, IDE, platform libraries.
Every piece of the puzzle that doesn't quite work like the SDK tools, means additional development/debugging effort.
Naturally the big question is always if the added benefit of using language X outside the expected workflow outweighs the extra development costs.
Just look at C++, it was on the path of being widely adopted by desktop OSes, every C compiler vendor was adding support for it.
Then BSD and Linux large scale adoption happened with GNU manifesto favouring C as the language to write portable software, Java and .NET came into the scene.
Microsoft was probably the only major OS vendor still caring about it, until LLVM happened and the wind started blowing again with C++11.
The embedded space is still an area where C++ is hardly seen, with a few conference talks last year discussing on how to advocate for it.
Now all major C compilers are written in C++, but had Microsoft focused only on .NET or LLVM never happened, and history would probably followed another path.