Interview With Bjarne Stroustrup

koval writes "artima.com has published an initial portion of interview with Bjarne Stroustrup. The scope of first part is mostly about improving the style of C++ programming and getting maximum from a language."

Confusion (not a Slashdot interview!)

[wackysootroom]

I see that a lot of people here are confused and posting questions for Bjarne Stroustrup. This is not a slashdot interview where people post questions for the guru and the editors pick the top 5 for the interviewee to answer. This is an interview that was done by an external website and not interviews.slashdot.org.

Weird guy

[the uNF cola]

I went to one of this guy's conferences on C++. I thought it'd be more in depth, but it was merely introduction to the features of C++. It does this, it does that. Neat libs like boost and the stl. Also has ACE libs for cross compatability

Well, as one may expect, someone asked about java. He got very biligerant and brief about it. "C++ is supported on N many more platforms than java." (Can't remember N). It was also the last question too, which left that "weird" sense in my mind's eye.

Re:From the article

[Anonymous Coward]

I suppose he could be talking about Psyco [sourceforge.net], the Python JIT module. I haven't used it yet, but I hear good things.

Re:Java ?

[ripleymj]

Try his FAQ: http://www.research.att.com/~bs/bs_faq.html#Java [att.com]

Re:From the article

[jcbphi]

These are some of the many reasons why Python is my language-of-choice, and why I don't program much in Java (my first programming language!). However, I should point out that what pops out is not super efficient C, but rather reasonably efficient compiled byte-code. Its nice, but python is rarely as fast as I'd sometimes like it to be.

But that's a story for another day...

Cheers,
J

C++0x

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

'Read what he's written about the C++200x standards revision cycle.' OK, fair enough, you do have evidence. Got a link?

I think perhaps there's a misunderstanding in the grandparent post. Stroustrup, and others on the standards committee, are on record as saying that they don't see the need for many language changes. They do, however, propose to make extensive library changes. Their reasoning is simply that there is likely to be more than one sensible way to approach topics such as, say, concurrency and synchronisation, and thus building them into the language itself is unduly limiting.

If you go to Stroustrup's home page (sorry, don't have a link handy, but it'll easily Google) and then look for his comments on C++0x, I'm guessing the slides from his presentation describing the above are still available.

Re:source code

[X]

I develop in both C++ and Java, and while I like both, it's pretty obvious to me that particularly for Junior and Intermediate level developers, Java development is significantly faster. Java's execution model also makes it much easier to design, implement and use frameworks and libraries. This in terms leads to faster development as well.

While for certain types of problems (for example anything requiring unsigned arithmetic), it's very difficult for Java to outperform C, in other cases I've seen computationally intensive Java code that was written in a few days get within 10-20% of the execution speed of C code that was written in a month (and this was prior to JDK 1.4). That level of performance difference, particularly with reduced development times (which give you more time to improve the efficiency of the overall design) makes Java a worthwhile candidate for a large chunk of the projects out there.

The sad truth is, a lot of C++ programmers are *not* at the skill level Bjarne is talking about. If even most C++ programmers were at that level, you'd suddenly find that C++ is a far better language to work with. Until programmers reach that level, it is a needlessly complex language which provides few useful advantages over it's competitors.