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A comment on Modern C++ Won't Save Us. Parent comment

Re:Modern C++ Won't Save Us by ncmncm on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @12:50AM (#19725692)
The whole point of C++ is that it enables writing more powerful libraries, capturing semantics in libraries that can then just be used. C++ is still quite a lot more powerful for this purpose than Rust. Rust will get better at it, over time, but it has a long way to go and C++ is not siiting still.

Rust is still a niche language, and if its rates of adoption and improvement do not keep up, it will remain a niche language, and fade away like Ada.

I cannot imagine a serious programmer switching from C++ to Go. If you can, you have a much livelier imaginary life than I do.

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Re:Modern C++ Won't Save Us by ajxs on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @01:57AM (#19725950)
The Ada partisans are all out in force here in this thread to defend Ada, all four of us. haha... For what it's worth, niche as Ada may be, it's an _important_ niche. It remains widespread in safety-critical applications, and isn't going anywhere anytime soon. It's really good to see Rust taking lessons from Ada/SPARK in the area of formal proofing! If any language is going to threaten C++, it looks like Rust. I don't expect an Ada resurgence to happen, unfortunately.

> I cannot imagine a serious programmer switching from C++ to Go. If you can, you have a much livelier imaginary life than I do.

This got a laugh out of me.

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Re:Modern C++ Won't Save Us by pjmlp on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @02:05AM (#19725984)
A large majority of Ada partisans found their corner in Java, C# and C++'s type system improvements over C, and made the best we could from the sour grapes of C's copy-paste compatibility.
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Re:Modern C++ Won't Save Us by ajxs on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @02:18AM (#19726058)
Calling myself an Ada partisan is a bit of a stretch. I've recently begun using it for embedded development, which is a domain almost completely dominated by C. That's the angle I'm coming in from.
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Re:Modern C++ Won't Save Us by pjmlp on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @02:40AM (#19726152)
It depends on each one naturally.

For me, coming from Turbo Pascal 3 - 6, it allowed me in 1993 to use a language with a similar level of safety and language features, instead of having to deal with PDP-11 constraints.

I was always the weird kid that asked the professors if I could deliver C projects written in C++ instead, which thankfully some of them did accept.

Specially given that at my degree, C was already out of fashion by the early 90's. First year students got to learn Pascal and C++, and were expected to learn C from their introduction to C++ programming.

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Re:Modern C++ Won't Save Us by nicoburns on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @07:11AM (#19727392)
> Rust is still a niche language

Only just barely at this point. It has significant projects from a lot of the largest companies (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc). Firefox is using it, Dropbox is using it, Red Hat is using it.

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Re:Modern C++ Won't Save Us by ncmncm on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @10:32AM (#19728978)
In five years it might be just barely a niche language. In ten, if it catches on, it won't be.

If it does, its users will have come over from Java, C#, and C.

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Re:Modern C++ Won't Save Us by rootlocus on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @02:15AM (#19726042)
Is this the "no serious programmer" fallacy?
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Re:Modern C++ Won't Save Us by Y_Y on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @03:21AM (#19726317)
No true hn commenter would make such a mistake.
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Re:Modern C++ Won't Save Us by machinecoffee on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @07:19AM (#19727427)
From what I can see, the whole point of C++ is to wrap existing C libraries and call them OO :-)
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