Transmission torrent client ported to C++

Re:Transmission torrent client ported to C++ by yakubin on Monday September 13, 2021 @05:18AM (#28509285)

People bring this point up every time C++ is criticized, but no, not all C++ shortcomings come from its age. In fact, most of the shortcomings it is criticized for today are new. The committee just keeps on adding new ones: initialization (mentioned by another reply to my comment), std::optional & std::variant (UB), concepts[1], std::thread (good luck debugging where the std::thread which crashes your program in a destructor came from), std::random_device()() being allowed to return 0 every time (which e.g. won't show up when you compile for your own machine, but will when you cross-compile) and probably many others which I don't remember off the top of my head.

[1]: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28098153>

But back to the point, my original comment wasn't about C++ being a bad choice. It was about STL. You can use C++ without STL. I pointed to one alternative: abseil.

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Re:Transmission torrent client ported to C++ by qalmakka on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @08:29AM (#28523713)

It does indirectly come from age, because legacy and backward compatibility mean that you can't simply change some core parts of the language at all. For instance, std::optional uses UB because _all_ of C++ does the same, and making std::optional<T>::operator* different from std::unique_ptr<T>::operator* would have caused similar concepts to have a different behaviour - something that would have definitely translated into weird bugs.

Also, C++ hasn't features like built-in move semantics and borrow checking, so it's very hard to enforce certain things that just come natural in Rust. That's simply stating a fact. The real point here is that std::optional<T> is much less likely to cause UB than a plain, old C pointer, so it's a net improvement - even though it could still lead to UB in some circumstances.

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