C++ feels like an old lover who I think fondly of. We were together many years, until about C++20, through thick and thin. It was exhilarating - blazingly fast, perhaps irresponsibly so, but heck, the ride was wild. It taught me so many things, and shaped me into the programmer I am today. But we went our separate ways when its shortcomings became too large to bear, and its behavior - too often undefined - no longer excusable.
I keep up with it because I still have love for it, but I have to admit I am deeply concerned about many of the life choices it is making. I should have seen how problematic it was, because I knew its history, but I had hope that it could change, and it just looks like it never will.
I'm still rooting for C++, even though I am very happy with my new primary language, Rust. I hope it changes to the better, because I really want the best for it, but right now I'm just not seeing it. It keeps repeating old mistakes (e.g., more UB footguns with every new feature), without addressing any of the big flaws (insufficient tools for building robust software).
I sometimes still write C++, but I'm not excited about it the way I used to be. When I do write C++, it's because I have to. When given the choice, Rust is simply just a better choice for almost everything I do. Right now, I don't see a future for C++ and me.
simonask
I'm really torn about C++. I love C++ but there are things that I really don't like about it as well. It's a fantastic language in a lot of ways, but it carries around 40+ years of cruft, of things that you wouldn't do like that if you were inventing a programming language today.
I haven't written C++ professionally for many years at this point, and my memories of using it professionally (pre C++ 11) are not happy ones: having to agree on a strict subset of the language that we were allowed to use, which avoided features that any of the compilers didn't support well, or that my teammates didn't like. Sadly back then the list of forbidden features included templates and namespaces.
But using C++ on personal projects nowadays, and being able to choose which bits of the language to use - and which to avoid - is much more enjoyable. And honestly, the language did get a lot better from C++ 11 onwards.
chris_j
In one word: Power.
C++ is by far the most powerful language around. And this is for the best and (often) also the worst.
In term of generic programming, control on hardware, capacity of abstraction and more generally expressivity: Nothing, even today, come even close to C++.
It is a language full of foot guns and it has its fair share of legacy problems.
But if you learn to avoid it (throught experience and pain). You can reach a productivity and a level of performance in C++ which is very difficult to beat with anything else, including Rust.
Ironically, I find it particularly true in the age of A.I.
Because the amount of C++ around is so tremendous, that agents are currently pretty good at it if guided properly.
adev_
I enjoy writing C++ code.
I acknowledge that C++ is a bad language in a lot of ways, but it's a bad language which I know really well, and it fits with how I think about code. And it lets me effortlessly do "clever" things with how memory is managed to avoid unnecessary allocations etc. I've already learned most of its idiosyncrasies, handling rvalue references/move semantics, how to go about implementing contracts like iterators and containers, etc.
I also like writing Rust, and I like how Rust makes sure I don't make mistakes. I think Rust is a better language in many ways and I think it's the future of low-level programming (and I think it's wild that it took so many decades to get a proper competitor to C++!). But I also like how C++ doesn't care and lets me do whatever I want without acting as a nanny. I would never ever dare to write a publicly exposed web server in C++, but a game? Sure!
mort96
I love C++, in the C++11 days I even organized a local C++ User Group at my university, and I've used it for the last 20 years as my main language.
I still appreciate its many merits but since a bit more than a year I migrated to Rust and I find it very difficult to look back, except for maintaining my previous C++ projects.
Surprisingly, it's not Rust's memory safety features that I miss the most when turning back to C++. It's mostly the absence of algebraic data types and pattern matching, and the split between compile-time and runtime polymorphism, i.e. concepts vs virtual classes, where in Rust you just have traits and use them for everything. On top of that the tooling and the ecosystem are just amazing.
There's a proposal for pattern matching sitting there under the committee's desk for some years now. With the mess that the standard committee is going through I really doubt they will be able to ship pattern matching for C++29 or even later. Too little too late.
So to answer the question, yes, I still appreciate the merits of C++ but I don't enjoy writing it as much as I have in the past.
gignico
I agree that C++11 was a big step. This was around the time I was working on a master's thesis, building a distributed optimization framework based around simulated annealing, using hand-optimized CUDA kernels on Nvidia CPUs. Writing CUDA code became a much nicer experience with C++11, and I didn't hate it.
However, it was still a bad choice for all the plumbing, caching, networking, job-management, etc that a useful framework needed, and I started using more and more Python. C++ was frustrating for those bits.
Eventually, after some important work on Numba[0], I was able to replace C++ completely, even for the CUDA kernels, and just write a subset of Python. It wasn't without it's (often quite esoteric) problems, but I was happy to throw out the last bits of C++ code. The thesis was praised and had some outside attention, but fizzled out in the years thereafter.
Still loving writing C++ and generally, it got much better over the years. User-Code (vs. library code) is quite easy to understand and it's easy to avoid pitfalls for the most part when using modern practices.
Main problem I see is that it has to move pretty slow. Reflection arriving finally now, but some more modern features might take an additional decade.
It feels however that around C++23/26, a lot of decade-long developings ( i.e.compile time stuff) are getting close to form a complete system without major limitations for the most part.
They also took notes regarding errors and templates, so the user experience also improved a lot (i.e. with concepts).
bulbar
Funny timing. It's been about a decade since I did anything with C++. Looks like I might be picking it back up for an ESP32 project.
giantg2
Yes I mostly enjoy it, but I don't do anything critical with it and I'm nowhere near expert level. I use the subset of it that makes sense to me. If I were doing something critical I'd want to use Ada, which I've played around with a little bit.
I think the lurking question is about Rust. I've read a book about it and it has some attractions but also what I think are some poor decisions. I suppose I'll have to use it for something sometime. C++ is sort of like Perl, it seems to me. A lot of what seems like bloat is actually affordances, so the thing you want is often surprisingly close at hand. Some things of course are awful.
I wouldn't call C++ a good language but it does most of the things. Enjoyment doesn't always mean productivity anyway. I enjoy using Forth but that's almost like enjoying riding a unicycle. I wouldn't do anything substantial with Forth except for recreation. I do feel fairly productive in C++.
throwaway81523
I'd like to put in a "no" after spending many years writing C++; my day job is in C# now.
The templating system is more powerful than any other language I have significant experience with, but that also lets people write incomprehensible systems. And the compile times always have been really long.
comments (10)
C++ feels like an old lover who I think fondly of. We were together many years, until about C++20, through thick and thin. It was exhilarating - blazingly fast, perhaps irresponsibly so, but heck, the ride was wild. It taught me so many things, and shaped me into the programmer I am today. But we went our separate ways when its shortcomings became too large to bear, and its behavior - too often undefined - no longer excusable.
I keep up with it because I still have love for it, but I have to admit I am deeply concerned about many of the life choices it is making. I should have seen how problematic it was, because I knew its history, but I had hope that it could change, and it just looks like it never will.
I'm still rooting for C++, even though I am very happy with my new primary language, Rust. I hope it changes to the better, because I really want the best for it, but right now I'm just not seeing it. It keeps repeating old mistakes (e.g., more UB footguns with every new feature), without addressing any of the big flaws (insufficient tools for building robust software).
I sometimes still write C++, but I'm not excited about it the way I used to be. When I do write C++, it's because I have to. When given the choice, Rust is simply just a better choice for almost everything I do. Right now, I don't see a future for C++ and me.
simonask
I haven't written C++ professionally for many years at this point, and my memories of using it professionally (pre C++ 11) are not happy ones: having to agree on a strict subset of the language that we were allowed to use, which avoided features that any of the compilers didn't support well, or that my teammates didn't like. Sadly back then the list of forbidden features included templates and namespaces.
But using C++ on personal projects nowadays, and being able to choose which bits of the language to use - and which to avoid - is much more enjoyable. And honestly, the language did get a lot better from C++ 11 onwards.
chris_j
C++ is by far the most powerful language around. And this is for the best and (often) also the worst.
In term of generic programming, control on hardware, capacity of abstraction and more generally expressivity: Nothing, even today, come even close to C++.
It is a language full of foot guns and it has its fair share of legacy problems.
But if you learn to avoid it (throught experience and pain). You can reach a productivity and a level of performance in C++ which is very difficult to beat with anything else, including Rust.
Ironically, I find it particularly true in the age of A.I.
Because the amount of C++ around is so tremendous, that agents are currently pretty good at it if guided properly.
adev_
I acknowledge that C++ is a bad language in a lot of ways, but it's a bad language which I know really well, and it fits with how I think about code. And it lets me effortlessly do "clever" things with how memory is managed to avoid unnecessary allocations etc. I've already learned most of its idiosyncrasies, handling rvalue references/move semantics, how to go about implementing contracts like iterators and containers, etc.
I also like writing Rust, and I like how Rust makes sure I don't make mistakes. I think Rust is a better language in many ways and I think it's the future of low-level programming (and I think it's wild that it took so many decades to get a proper competitor to C++!). But I also like how C++ doesn't care and lets me do whatever I want without acting as a nanny. I would never ever dare to write a publicly exposed web server in C++, but a game? Sure!
mort96
I still appreciate its many merits but since a bit more than a year I migrated to Rust and I find it very difficult to look back, except for maintaining my previous C++ projects.
Surprisingly, it's not Rust's memory safety features that I miss the most when turning back to C++. It's mostly the absence of algebraic data types and pattern matching, and the split between compile-time and runtime polymorphism, i.e. concepts vs virtual classes, where in Rust you just have traits and use them for everything. On top of that the tooling and the ecosystem are just amazing.
There's a proposal for pattern matching sitting there under the committee's desk for some years now. With the mess that the standard committee is going through I really doubt they will be able to ship pattern matching for C++29 or even later. Too little too late.
So to answer the question, yes, I still appreciate the merits of C++ but I don't enjoy writing it as much as I have in the past.
gignico
However, it was still a bad choice for all the plumbing, caching, networking, job-management, etc that a useful framework needed, and I started using more and more Python. C++ was frustrating for those bits.
Eventually, after some important work on Numba[0], I was able to replace C++ completely, even for the CUDA kernels, and just write a subset of Python. It wasn't without it's (often quite esoteric) problems, but I was happy to throw out the last bits of C++ code. The thesis was praised and had some outside attention, but fizzled out in the years thereafter.
0: https://numba.pydata.org/
dotdi
Main problem I see is that it has to move pretty slow. Reflection arriving finally now, but some more modern features might take an additional decade.
It feels however that around C++23/26, a lot of decade-long developings ( i.e.compile time stuff) are getting close to form a complete system without major limitations for the most part.
They also took notes regarding errors and templates, so the user experience also improved a lot (i.e. with concepts).
bulbar
giantg2
I think the lurking question is about Rust. I've read a book about it and it has some attractions but also what I think are some poor decisions. I suppose I'll have to use it for something sometime. C++ is sort of like Perl, it seems to me. A lot of what seems like bloat is actually affordances, so the thing you want is often surprisingly close at hand. Some things of course are awful.
I wouldn't call C++ a good language but it does most of the things. Enjoyment doesn't always mean productivity anyway. I enjoy using Forth but that's almost like enjoying riding a unicycle. I wouldn't do anything substantial with Forth except for recreation. I do feel fairly productive in C++.
throwaway81523
The templating system is more powerful than any other language I have significant experience with, but that also lets people write incomprehensible systems. And the compile times always have been really long.
pjc50