C/C++ Back On Top of the Programming Heap? 611
Drethon writes "On this day in 2008, a submission was posted that C/C++ was losing ground so I decided to check out its current state. It seems that C has returned to the top while Java has dropped by the same amount, VB and PHP have dropped drastically, C++ is holding fast but now in third place and Objective-C and C# have climbed quite a bit. 2008 data thanks to SatanicPuppy: 1. Java (20.5%); 2. C (.14.7%); 3. VB (11.6%); 4. PHP (10.3%); 5. C++ (9.9%); 6. Perl (5.9%); 7. Python (4.5%); 8. C# (.3.8%); 9. Ruby(2.9%); 10. Delphi (2.7%). The other 10 in the top 20 are: JavaScript, D, PL/SQL, SAS, Pascal, Lisp/Scheme, FoxPro/xBase, COBOL, Ada, and ColdFusion."
64 bit porting? (Score:2)
I would expect that a lot of companies are probably working on importing their legacy systems to work for the new 64 bit systems.
Now that most PC's are out with more then 4 gigs of RAM. Many OS's are going towards 64 bit OS's and a lot of those old 32 bit systems programmed in C for performance, needs to be upgraded.
A lot of those programs that seemed to run fine in windows 3.1 are finally stop working in windows 7 64 bit.
I am not saying C coding is just for legacy systems, but a good amount of legacy syste
Re:64 bit porting? (Score:4, Interesting)
I would expect that a lot of companies are probably working on importing their legacy systems to work for the new 64 bit systems.
a good amount of legacy systems are written in C, and most of those C written programs are fairly optimized for their platform they were designed to run, and we are starting to switch to 64 bit and multi-core architecture.
You're more or less paraphrasing an email I recall from Linus back in '94 when the 64 bit Digital Alpha port was just beginning. Of course that's 18 years ago not anything new. I think we still have many more years of the "64 bits is new" meme left. With more GOOG effort I could probably find that email. Or it might have been an old Linux Journal article about the alpha port rather than an email. Hmm.
I was pretty late to the conversion to 64 bits compared to most people in the biz. I don't think the debian amd64 port was released until 2007 ish, I think as part of Debian 4.0/etch, although I was using the amd64 port as "testing" (before it became "etch") for at least a year or two earlier.
Some of our amd64 hardware at work is considered legacy now, just because its so old.
I remember in the early years of the 32/64 bit conversion, like half a decade ago, running legacy non-free software like the 32 bit flash player on a 64 bit OS was a pretty interesting problem, but it was all solved a long time ago, so its not interesting anymore. I would imagine someday in the future the windows folks will have similar interesting experiences when they catch up to linux, as they always eventually do.
more to 64-bit than that (Score:4, Interesting)
Moving to 64-bit may be a recompile away *for perfectly written code*. In the real world, a lot of 32-bit code assumes you can store pointers in ints, assumes that alignment and packing rules of pointers and ints are the same, prints out pointers using int formatting, uses algorithms that don't scale beyond ~16GB of memory, etc.
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When will people learn... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Not that different.
For the most part if you write C code in C++ the code works fine.
Re:When will people learn... (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember, a good Fortran programmer can write good Fortran code in any language. But that doesn't mean that every language is like Fortran.
Re:When will people learn... (Score:5, Interesting)
> except when you write in C++ as though it is C, you get really bad C++
Total nonsense. Almost every game these days is written in C++ and while they all vary in the amount of applied OOP and generic meta programming, the fastest ones use a data driven approach because OOP is SLOW - raw C++ makes dealing with ONE type of object easy, but it doesn't help dealing with performance issues when you have MANY objects. I.e. Template Bloat, lack of virtual dead stripping, and inflated deep hierarchies, to start with.
C is a good language because it forces one to think about runtime performance. When you have some junior coder sticking a virtual function call inside a for loop because he doesn't the three levels of pointers being applied the problem is not the language per say, but programmers who don't understand enough of the hardware to know "There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"
Higher level languages tend to help minimize *developer* time, at the expense of run-time.
Re:When will people learn... (Score:4, Informative)
Higher level languages tend to help minimize *developer* time, at the expense of run-time.
If you're really interested in run time, you should be more concerned with asymptotic ("big-O") performance rather than basic code efficiency.
Also, no amount of speed-up makes up for code that is wrong. The proper reason for choosing a higher-level language is that its readability contributes to correctness.
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The closer to the hardware you get, the more the lines blur between the CS ideal (Big O) and the hardware reality (registers and bandwidth and machine code interleaving). You really can't optimize for one without optimizing for the other.
Sure ... and C++ is just as good at this as C.
OTOH C++ is good at the big-picture stuff. C isn't.
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Fixed that for you.
First, they're mostly written in C++ because you don't prematurely optimize. Its the root of all evil, as Knuth said. Then, you go back, and you find your extremely critical sections, your bottlenecks, and THOSE you write specific libraries in C to optimize. But even then, lots of your work is going to be done by existing windows or directx libraries. Those DirectX libraries are written in C, sure, as are drivers... but that amounts to
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Writing modern C++ doesn't mean you have to use OOP. You don't. You can do data driven quite easily.
However, modern C++ means to take advantage of modern constructs, like smart pointers, and modern containers, instead of using unsafe and non-bounds checked arrays.
Re:When will people learn... (Score:5, Interesting)
Except when you write in C++ as though it is C, you get really bad C++ code.
When you write C++ as though it were C++, you get really bad, terribly inefficient code. If you need to extract maximum performance from your code, a C-with-classes approach to SIMD & multi-core optimisations tends to lead to better results imho. It's very difficult to adhere to what most people refer to 'good C++', because 'good C++' implies nicely encapsulated objects. This doesn't really work so well when you have 256bit wide SIMD registers. Suddenly you find your C++ classes are actually maintaining the state of 8+ objects, and then some of the idioms start unravelling. OOP is currently being stabbed to death by concurrency & parallelism, and there is nothing anyone can do to save it.
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Except when you write in C++ as though it is C, you get really bad C++ code.
When you write C++ as though it were C++, you get really bad, terribly inefficient code. If you need to extract maximum performance from your code, a C-with-classes approach to SIMD & multi-core optimisations tends to lead to better results imho. It's very difficult to adhere to what most people refer to 'good C++', because 'good C++' implies nicely encapsulated objects. This doesn't really work so well when you have 256bit wide SIMD registers. Suddenly you find your C++ classes are actually maintaining the state of 8+ objects, and then some of the idioms start unravelling. OOP is currently being stabbed to death by concurrency & parallelism, and there is nothing anyone can do to save it.
Surely it can be beyond your wit to write array classes to apply SIMD operations efficiently and cleanly on arrays of numbers?
Re:When will people learn... (Score:4, Funny)
When you write C++ as though it were C++, you get really bad, terribly inefficient code.
[Citation Needed]
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With C++ basically being a superset of C, I wouldn't say that's entirely true.
Regardless, though, when you look at the wide world of programming languages, they are _far_ more distinct from everything else than they are from each other. Java, C#, Python, Ruby, JS, HTML(?!) I can't think of a single mainstream language aside from "C/C++" that uses pointers lacks a garbage collector. So in regard to practical application and required skills, they are effectively quite similar.
Good news! (Score:3)
My two favorite languages aren't dying!
Whatever anyone else thinks, I think they're not only extremely solid languages that have stood the test of time, but they're both really fun to program in. I know it's at least somewhat subjective, and right tool for the job and all, but that doesn't mean you can't have preferences and it's good to see the "Yankees" of programming not headed into obscurity.
Re:Good news! (Score:5, Funny)
My two favorite languages aren't dying!
Yes, Perl and Ruby combined have twice the share of python. It's really more like 20 times, since you can get ten times as much done in a single line of perl.
Re:Good news! (Score:5, Funny)
...since you can get ten times as much done in a single line of perl.
Yes and you will be the only human on earth that knows what it does.
Re:Good news! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Good news! (Score:5, Funny)
...since you can get ten times as much done in a single line of perl.
Yes and you will be the only human on earth that knows what it does.
That's why we call it a "write-only" programming language.
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Programming is fun when it poses a challenge. So while I agree that C++ coding is fun, it's inefficient for a lot of purposes.
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They were never dying. C and C++ underpin all OSes, the Internet, pretty much the multimedia apps you use, the vast majority of games/game engines, etc. and they are the implementation languages of all the 'hip' fad languages.
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Java dropped by the same amount (Score:4, Interesting)
Will Java drop even further because of the whole Oracle mess?
I guess I am surprised that Python is ahead of C#, and that Ruby is so low given its underground buzz.
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If Ruby wasn't such a niche language (at least at this point in time) it wouldn't be an underground language, now would it? Underground means outside of the mainstream which Ruby is for the most part.
Re:Java dropped by the same amount (Score:5, Insightful)
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Python was ahead of C# , what's listed in the summary is the 2008 index, the 2012 index has C# about three and a half points ahead of python.
Ruby is a hype machine, you can tell by the huge spikes and valleys when you see its popularity graphed out individually over the years. It's seemed to have relegated itself now to about a point and a half now.
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Ruby.html [tiobe.com]
Re:Java dropped by the same amount (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Java dropped by the same amount (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't just Oracle. IBM is more heavily invested in Java than the owner themselves. Google too. Between those 3, you can't possibly avoid Java or think that it will continue to drop in the Enterprise space. Just not going to happen.
PHP at #4 (Score:3)
Opinion (Score:4, Interesting)
The C++ longevity is expected. Every engineer worth his weight in salt should be able to write C++ code. (get off my lawn etc.)
I am curious abobut where the C growth is coming from. Embedded stuff? Native libraries for the increasing volume other higher level languages?
Re:Opinion (Score:4, Interesting)
Every engineer worth his weight in salt
You're mixing up the phrase "worth its weight in gold" with "worth his salt".
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Addendum: Every engineer worth his weight in salt should be able to write Lisp/Scheme code as well.
I just had to check this. According to what local councils in the UK pay for salt for gritting streets, my weight in salt is worth less than £2.
Popularity Contest (Score:2, Insightful)
The Tiobe index is a popularity contest - a pageant for programming languages - so, you get the trend on what's hot, but that is just part of the IT business.
I challenge you to find 5 banks whose core are not built with Cobol, for example.
My point is that real use != trending languages
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Trends swinging back (Score:2)
The trend after the web became big in the mid-90s was to find specialized languages and try to code in those.
The trend has swung backward. People are now looking for general purpose languages. They want Swiss army knives, not specialized tools.
NXT-G ? (Score:3)
The 20th language is NXT-G. What the fuck is that? Is it really lego's programming language for robots as wikipedia indicates (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NXT-G) ? And that is more popular than bash or matlab?
Not a ranking of the best or the most (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a survey, no more, no less. Using it to make decisions about your career is foolhardy at best.
Logo is #19? (Score:2)
The TIOBE index is *ABSOLUTELY MEANINGLESS* (Score:5, Interesting)
It's unbelievable that people still pay any attention whatsoever to it. Some company comes up with a ridiculous 'methodology' to gauge the popularity of languages, and people assume that it's actually related in any way to reality.
Further reading:
The best place to start is at TIOBE's own methodology description page: http://bit.ly/h3ftBa
No need to go much beyond that, to figure out that it's a meaningless index. To save you the reading, it more or less boils down to this:
---
The ratings are calculated by counting hits of the most popular search engines. The search query that is used is
+" programming"
---
That's all.
Still need some more convincing:
Why TIOBE isn't all that useful (mild): http://bit.ly/IeG0yA
The TIOBE index is being gamed: http://bit.ly/IeGnt1
It's no short of ridiculous. Time to stop paying attention to it, move along!
Pascal but no Delphi (Score:3)
What compiler are Pascal developers using that isn't Delphi. Aren't most Pascal compilers capable of handling Delphi's Object Pascal anyway?
Shouldn't the Pascal and Delphi be combined into one grouping the way that all the different C++ are combined?
On the subject of comparison... (Score:5, Interesting)
You can even click each language and see what comment it is best for. For example, Haskell is top for "This language has a strong static type system" and "When I write code in this language I can be very sure it is correct". Meanwhile, something like PHP is top for "I am sometimes embarrassed to admit to my peers that I know this language" and "This language has many features which feel "tacked on"".
It is good that java loses ground to C/C++ (Score:3)
How odd... (Score:2)
In Other News... (Score:3, Funny)
Home Depot has reported that the hammer has moved up 2 places in the rankings overtaking the Phillips head screwdriver and pliers as the most widely used hand tool. Also moving up in the ranks were the flashlight and the crescent wrench, precipitating the further decline of the Allen wrench and the drill bit in the rankings.
Haha, who still uses the Allen wrench? Clearly the Phillips head screwdriver is superior. Newbs.
Re:In Other News... (Score:5, Funny)
Hammer - Obviously perl. Technically, you can do absolutely anything with it, but sometimes the results will look like hell. Swiss-Army Chainsaw makes a good second tool choice for perl.
Phillips screwdriver - Obviously Ruby. The mythology is both came from Japan, although phillips doesn't sound very Japanese, in ye olden days stuff made in America had slot screws and stuff made in Japan had philips screws, so obviously phillips came from Japan. Also more ruby is probably being written outside Japan than within, now a days, but I still hear people claim Ruby is japanese.
Just fill out a physical plant request form in triplicate and get your boss/mom to sign and your bosses boss to notarize - Obviously the hyperverbose business languages like cobol and java where hello world takes 3 pages and an hour of explanation.
Plumbers helper / plunger - Obvious GDB reference
Table saw - Obvious assembly language reference. Works great and fast, until you cut your hand off and it makes a mess of the project.
Having trouble finding analogies for the rototiller and the roofing nailgun. Please advise...
Java is poor for memory-intensive codes (Score:5, Interesting)
There is definitely movement away from Java and toward C/C++ for some types of software. Applications bottlenecked by memory performance, like databases and high-performance codes, will often be faster than a language like Java by integer factors. When people assert that Java is about as fast as C/C++ they are talking about code like tight, CPU-bound loops. However, Java is wasteful of memory and CPU cache lines in a way that C/C++ is not under normal circumstances which has a significant adverse impact on the performance of some codes.
On recent processors, memory performance is a bigger bottleneck than CPU performance for performance-sensitive codes. The throughput of CPUs has grown faster than our ability to keep those CPUs fed from memory. In the supercomputing world this started to become evident years ago; memory benchmarks like STREAM became more closely correlated with real-world performance than CPU benchmarks like LINPACK for a great many algorithms. The resurgence of C/C++ is partly driven by this reality since it makes memory optimization relatively straightforward and you can receive large gains relative to Java for modest effort.
A smaller but also important driver away from Java is the GC. The increasing focus on "real-time" and predictable latency for applications like analytics and database engines is complicated when Java's garbage collector is inserted in the middle. This is a chronic point of pain for some applications.
I developed Java for years but my latest project (a real-time analytical database engine) is being written in C++ for the above reasons, among others. Writing high-performance applications of this type is actually pretty painful in Java because you end up doing unnatural things in the language to even approach the efficiency of conventional C++. Anecdotally, many of our C++ developers were doing Java until recently so the statistic does not surprise me.
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The days where we could just say "it's ok, buy a bigger server" or "next year we'll have enough computing power" are over. We now have to do more with what we've got, and that means more efficient programming.
The days of the hardware being trivially the source of all speedups required are long gone. Also long gone are the massive shared memory machines; they really didn't scale without the use of enormous amounts of money and that never really changed (the real cost of supercomputers back at around 2000 was in the funky backplane interconnect). Now, we have to learn to do more with message passing (that scales far better, in many ways) and we need to learn to only pass around the data that's necessary (because s
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And if you hire the right developers, that never happens in the first place. Don't believe me? Consider all of the countless OS kernels, embedded devices and games developed in C or C++ that run without a hitch.
Hell the only places where C/C++ coded servers barf in 2 hours are in the fevered imaginations of Java programmers who think managing your own memory is soooooooo
Ah, TIOBE again. (Score:4, Insightful)
TIOBE makes for an interesting toy measure. But for truly reliable conclusions, particularly those related to the health of our favorite technologies, we must instead ask: does NetCraft confirm it?
Headline is misleading (Score:3)
Actually 'C' is the "top dog" whereas 'C++' is #3 behind Java.
C recently had its standard updated and the uptick could be a reflection of this. Not to mention the increased exposure that C is getting from objective-C.
No Groovy? (Score:3)
What no Groovy? Oh well, I should follow the masses mindlessly without considering the right tool for the job.
Automatic cleanup (Score:3)
Without automatic cleanup, it was only a matter of time before C/C++ rose to the top of the heap.
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I'm not sure what you mean by "whole os". The entire kernel is basically C, but technically C++ like Microsoft likes. Substantial amounts of things that come on a windows disc these days are written in C#.
Re:Because of Windows (Score:4, Informative)
It depends what you are doing with it - in the server space, .Net is used all over the place (Dynamics CRM, SharePoint, SQL Server, Exchange - all have a dependency on .Net these days).
Windows kernel is C (Score:5, Informative)
The Windows OS kernel is mostly in C with some assembly (just like Unix/Linux/BSD/OSX). The Windows GUI is mostly C++ (but so is KDE).
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Except that Boost is an unholy mess designed by students who threw in everything they thought would be cool without a decent overall approach. If it disappeared overnight I wouldn't shed any tears.
Re:Windows kernel is C (Score:5, Insightful)
Some parts of boost are excellent, some are crap. Your comment reeks of ignorance.
Some excellent libraries are: optional, bind, any, lexical_cast, multi-index container, graph (documentation is awful though), xpressive, shared_ptr, asio.
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It is the approach that matters, not the particular library. There is no great trick to Boost signals/slots, I coded a servicable one myself using libsigslot to get the basic idea. The thing is, once you have done so the whole misbegotten MOC mess becomes irrelevant and you can integrate your signal/slot code with, for example, your project templates.
I keep seeing these elaborate explanations full of bafflegab about introspection and scripting support to justify QT's big design mistake with MOC, but the arg
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Windows kernel is C (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll give you my opinion as an experienced C++ developer, Boost contributor and C++ standards committee member.
Boost is a set of C++ libraries written by a lot of different people. Some is good, some is bad. Some is old and works with ancient compilers, some is new and requires the latest bleeding edge implementations.The good thing it has about it compared to average code is that it was written by people with a relatively good understanding of the C++ programming language, which is very complex. This typically means that not only it is of better quality than average, but also that it can do more advanced things than what an average developer could think of As such, it is very good for educational purposes, and just reading through the code or the documentation can make people discover very interesting software design. Of course, some libraries have very tedious implementations and are very mature (like PP or MPL), so there is no point in rewriting them yourself: just use them directly.
The fact that it is advanced is however a double-edged sword: to use software in production, you must be able to easily diagnose problems and bugs, even if the code is not yours. Doing that with advanced language constructs can require some non-elementary skills, therefore using those libraries can require a steep learning curve and should thus be seen as an investment.
It's all a matter of studying the library for your needs, evaluating the risks, and making your choice.
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Oh really? Look at most of TR1 for plenty of examples of Boost libraries that are now part of the C++ standard.
Boost is a proving ground for many concepts that have since been adopted into the language as part of C++11. Some Boost libraries are no longer needed because of native language support rather than a library (BOOST_FOREACH is now a syntax feature, not to mention lambda expressions), and these language features are often clearly designed after the Boost equivalent (as far as I can tell). Others w
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KDE technically isn't C++. It's written in Qt, which is a set of bastardized extensions to C++ (see meta object compiler) that produce generated C++ code.
This is the worst description I've seen of Qt and the MOC in a long time. Qt is perfectly valid and normal C++. It just requires that you link against some generated code. Big deal. However, since the code generator (Meta Object Compiler) has the word "compiler" in it, either fools some people into thinking that requires some special tool, or is used to spread some FUD.
Breaking news: the XML files that Qt Designer creates are used to generate C++ code.
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QT MOC is the opposite of elegant, it is an abomination. But it has no shortage of apologists.
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Re:Buffer overflow (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Buffer overflow (Score:4, Insightful)
Because too many of these programmers don't program anymore. They just tie together modules and libraries with function calls and templates.
The reason C is still big is because there's just so much stuff out that that is not a PC. On a PC you can get away with being unskilled and sloppy, because memory is getting cheaper, CPUs are getting faster, and users are becoming less discerning. Most computers in the world though are not PCs, they're small things hidden inside of devices and they don't run Windows. Some may be slow, some may be fast, but most have resource constraints of some form. Quite a lot of them come with no third party OS or run time library either. And someone has to write all that stuff in something that's reasonably efficient and portable and C and C++ are pretty much the common choices.
Re:Buffer overflow (Score:5, Insightful)
Might as well start off writing it all in assembly, since compilers don't always produce the fastest possible code.
Actually, things are advanced to the point where with very rare exception a human writing assembly is almost certainly not going to produce the optimal approach anymore. First, compliers represent the result of the best and brightest and trial and error for optimizing code structures into streams of assembly that are frequently counter-intuitively faster than a person is likely to think of on their own. Secondly, prcossor manufacturers tend to get their latest and greatest instruction sets into compilers, and trying to keep up with those dynamics would be implausible for a human writing special purpose code.
So manually writing in assembly is no longer always faster in practice and in fact usually slower. I don't think the same claim can be made of any particular managed language compared to C/C++.
Although I will agree that language choice *usually* matters far less than algorithmic choices and occasionally people jump to a language change in a project to alleviate slowness only to end up not significantly better than they started because of glaring design problems that dwarf the language performance concerns.
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Re:Buffer overflow (Score:4, Insightful)
For a lot of functions it is not difficult to write if more efficiently than some good compilers. It's a trick to optimize it the way you need to for certain resource constraints. You wouldn't want to do that for everything, it would take too long. But it's doable for key functions in run time libraries (ie, writing a memcpy that knows how to use your cache instructions).
The "average case" is fine most of the time but quite often there are exceptions. I've seen people who rely on this stuff too much, who argue until they're blue in the face that STL maps are "proven optimal by people smarter than you".
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My pocket knife can be used in a completely safe manner. It can also be used in a completely unsafe manner. How it's used it up to me. Because it can be used dangerously doesn't mean that we shouldn't have pocket knives.
Re:Buffer overflow (Score:5, Insightful)
A pocket knife doesn't implicitly create objects or fail to cleanup if you forget to make your destructor virtual.
C++ has very complex rules that take years to hone and understand correctly, and even then mistakes are easy to make. The proof is that even today when you go to C++ forums people are still asking about obscure language rules while in Java forums the conversation has moved on to issues of design. Nobody needs to discuss the meaning of language constructs in Java because they are obvious.
It isn't however obvious that an error in your cannonical class definition could cause this code to create a memory leak:
a = b;
Clearly proper use of a tool is important. But tools without safety features are more likely to cause accidents.
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Java is not exactly issue-free as well. For example lack of comparison operator for strings forces a programmer to abandon an intiutive ways of doying things and to always remember to follow the language obscure rules.
String is an object. All objects are to be compared using equals method. It's not obscure by far. Compare that most C++ queries.
If you want a good obscure Java language requirement, it's the fact that arrays are objects and essentially don't have a functional equals method(you have to use java.util.Arrays).( So next time you post this, at least you'll have a good example)
Re:Buffer overflow (Score:4, Interesting)
Wow... I haven't touched assembly since about 15 years ago. Trying to program your assembly to outperform a compiler with out-of-order instruction execution on the CPU takes a mad genius. You probably would get about 10x the speed boost by rewriting code to use GP-GPU instead.
In defense of the grandparent, I'm fluent in C++, program it every day, and find it a mindbogglingly complex set of bolted on features that keep expanding and some that overlap each other. From a design perspective, elegant would be the last word I'd use for it, and it really was never a well designed extension on top of C IMO. Objective-C is a MUCH cleaner object extension to C, but it ties you to Apple (yeah, I know about GNUStep, but Apple drives the development of the language). In addition, many C++ features were so poorly implemented that they are rarely used, like try-throw-catch (I have yet to see professional code that uses them - hell, I've seen more code that uses the taboo GOTO for error handling than try-throw-catch). Templates are extremely powerful in C++, but often lead to ugly, obfuscated code. Multiple inheritance has also caused me many headaches compared to interfaces (like Java and Objective-C). C++11 only adds to the feature bloat, but some of the features are more "finally" for me like lambda functions and native multithreading. I've wanted native multithreading since I first started thread programming back in 1991, having to use 4 different thread libraries for 4 platforms (I believe pthreads, Windows threads, MacOS9 threads, and BeOS threads at that time - this was all student programming and I was still learning C++ and very self-motivated). D seems to have cleaned up a lot of the issues I have with C++, but wasn't ready for prime time when I tried it last (several years ago).
I have a love hate relationship with perl, too (another language I use practically every day). It gets the job done, but really, I never needed objects in perl, and haven't used any new features since about perl 3. That said, it is the best cross platform shell language that I've found, and I can write and run quick powerful cross platform scripts.
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C++11 only adds to the feature bloat
What feature bloat? If you don't use the new features, you don't incur any cost. No bloat.
And many of the new features that you really should be using (smart pointers) have very little, if any overhead.
Re:Buffer overflow (Score:5, Insightful)
Given the prevalence of SQL injection attacks, which could be prevented with a single function call, I have to say that buffer over-(and under-) flows are really a red herring. Unless a language makes it literally impossible to write insecure code, lazy and bad programmers will find a way.
Aburd nonsense. (Score:3)
Make the insecure code hard to write and make the secure code easy to write. Problem 99% solved.
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Re:Buffer overflow (Score:5, Informative)
now that C++ will get move semantics
Not will, _has_ move semantics. As of last August.
Re:Buffer overflow (Score:5, Insightful)
...And as with most language standards standards, that actually means that a developer can safely begin to use the new feature in portable code starting around the year 2025.
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Re:Eh? (Score:5, Funny)
So is Lisp in some sort of state of perpetual undeath then?
Re:Eh? (Score:4, Funny)
“Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye.
Justice the founder of my fabric moved:
To rear me was the task of Power divine,
Supremest Wisdom, and primeval Love.
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
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Readable C? (Score:3)
C is awesome incarnate: lean, readable and full of low level goodness.
C can be readable .... if the programmer has kept to a reasonable kind of discipline and order in the coding, that is. (FTFY)
Obfuscating C can be as hard to read as old 'spaghetti Fortran', I think.
-wb-
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How on earth can you think that malloc()/free()/strcat()/strdup() and raw pointers is good programming practice?
It's pretty horrible, but it doesn't have the deployment horrors that C++ does. (I've worked with a few programs that were C++ and building redistributable binaries of them was always a pain; when the developer switched to using C, the problems went away.)
The real problem of C++ (apart from its half-assed-ness in the OO department, from a Smalltalk perspective :-)) is that it tends to bind consumers of interfaces very closely to the implementations of those interfaces. Yes, this makes the object code fast,
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Doh.
My mistake. Can't read years properly.
But still, how pointless to put the OLD data in the summary and the 4+ years more modern data in the article?
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Because the linked article is about the current state, the Slashdot article is about the comparison with 2008 and so includes the missing information that the linked article does not.
Re:Eh? (Score:5, Informative)
The site was loading very slowly so I scraped the 2012 rankings for the curious but impatient:
1 - C - 17.555% .NET - 0.978%
2 - Java - 17.026%
3 - C++ - 8.896%
4 - Objective-C - 8.236%
5 - C# - 7.348%
6 - PHP - 5.288%
7 - (Visual) Basic - 4.962%
8 - Python - 3.665%
9 - JavaScript - 2.879%
10 - Perl - 2.387%
11 - Ruby - 1.510%
12 - PL/SQL - 1.373%
13 - Delphi/Object Pascal - 1.370%
14 - Visual Basic
15 - Lisp - 0.951%
16 - Pascal - 0.812%
17 - Ada - 0.783%
18 - Transact-SQL - 0.760%
19 - Logo - 0.652%
20 - NXT-G - 0.578%
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The interesting one is Objective-C has nearly overtaken C++. It'll probably be passed in the next couple of months.
In fact if the trend continues, Objective-C will be the most popular language in about 3 years.
http://www.tiobe.com/content/paperinfo/tpci/images/tpci_trends.png [tiobe.com]
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Just speculating here, but I expect Objective-C to level off since it's essentially bound to one company, Apple.
Java, sadly, seems to be in decline as it transitions form a real programming language to a vendor-specific one. (Granted C# is still enjoying a very long-term, steady rise, but Oracle isn't Microsoft...)
Re:Eh? (Score:4, Interesting)
https://xkcd.com/605/ [xkcd.com] :)
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Maybe you should try understanding the language? Objective-C is dynamic. That means it won't do type checking the way other languages will. You have to be a little more careful than with other languages, but it does have its benefits--some of which are described here [stackoverflow.com].
Also, Xcode will definitely spit out a warning if you try something like that, and you can always turn on "treat warnings as errors". You act like it will merrily leave you clueless as to your mistake, which is untrue unless you suppress wa
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That depends on the method used to gather the information. If you consider the percentage to be the ratio of software titles released to a language and the number of companies advertising the applications that are generated when compared to the market, I'm kind of suprised that the iPhone hasn't driven that number much higher. Mind you, they aren't basing these stats on lines of code, or even the real strength of the language within the programming community: they are basing it on popularity at the moment.
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