Thriving in a Crowded and Changing World: C++ 2006–2020 [pdf]

Re:Thriving in a Crowded and Changing World: C++ 2006–2020 [... by tonyedgecombe on Friday July 16, 2021 @08:43AM (#27855641)

I switched to C# after a decade of writing C++. My productivity went up and bug count went down. The main thing I found was when looking at any particular problem I need to spend less of my mental energy reasoning about the language so can spend more on the problem at hand.

Also it seemed no matter how well I learned the language there was always something there to trip me up.

Faster build times help as well (one project went from 10 minutes to less than one whilst increasing the feature count).

I still write some C++ but only if I can't avoid it.

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Re:Thriving in a Crowded and Changing World: C++ 2006–2020 [... by spacedcowboy on Friday July 16, 2021 @11:43AM (#27857477)

Agreed. C++ passed the complexity threshold (where it's "worth it") for me a while back.

I still use a subset of modern C++ when I'm doing something cross-platform, and Qt helps, but it too often felt I was fighting a war on two fronts (the language, and the problem) when I was trying to keep up. So I gave up trying. And life is a lot happier now.

As a Mac guy, I still think ObjC (yes, I know, you don't like the syntax) was pretty much at the optimal level of complexity and performance. Not as fast as C++ in general, but plenty fast enough for 99% of things. Wonderful standard library with Foundation, and ARC really works well - memory management just isn't a thing I have to think about when I'm using it.

Swift ? Well, now I'm in the "I hate the syntax" camp :) I like my code to look neat (which is easy with C++ and C) and Swift just looks fugly to me.

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