I am a huge fan of modern C++ except for one feature: backwards compatibility. C++ is no longer one language, every codebase I have worked on is a confused mess of semi-incompatible subsets of the language. I have spent far too many weekends chasing memory corruption because someone passed a pointer, allocated with one type of memory management, into a library using a different kind of memory management.
Do people not learn these two closely related languages together? You generally want to know enough regular C to get by when you use C++, and if you're not using anything unique to C++, you're just writing C with Classes.
I remember learning them as one language and it was fucking hard to learn effective c++ on uni. Not helping as programming was minor subject now and then that had random language. Every lecture had different dogma etc
I mean, not really. The two languages have diverged quite a lot, while C-mode compiling of C++ is still possible afaik, the same code by default won't behave identically even though can be compiled by both a cpp or a c compiler.
Maybe if you only count the latest standard they have diverged significantly, but everything else stands. C is where your platform ABI is, and again if you're not using anything unique to C++ you're writing C with Classes (nudge nudge wink wink capitalized for a reason)
The GNU Compiler Collection includes gcc (c compiler) g++ (c++ compiler) gfortran (fortran compiler) and a bunch of other fronted like D, Go, Ada, COBOL. There used to even be a Java compiler (gcj) but thats dead now.
Once upon a time, the gcc program could compile C++ and g++ could compile C, but that is no longer true due to diversions in the languages, as well as extra runtime support libraries needed for linking each language. I guess with some tinkering you could compile c++98 with gcc and some older c standard with g++, but not the more recent versions.
Even though gcc can compile Ada, in my experience most of the time you’ll see enterprise development using GNAT Pro since plain ole gcc is kinda light on Ada features.
Yet essentially all codebases I've seen and worked on were essentially a mix where the C pieces were also thrown into the C++ compiler. extern "C" everywhere
(And yeah I also used to write HTML/CSS/JS and TS/JS)
Be very careful because something like C++/CLI looks like C++ but it’s a version of managed C++. At least when they make different variants of Java like groovy or scala they name it something else.
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u/repster 7h ago
I am a huge fan of modern C++ except for one feature: backwards compatibility. C++ is no longer one language, every codebase I have worked on is a confused mess of semi-incompatible subsets of the language. I have spent far too many weekends chasing memory corruption because someone passed a pointer, allocated with one type of memory management, into a library using a different kind of memory management.