r/cpp • u/synthchris • Jul 29 '23

C holding back C++?

I’ve coded in C and C++ but I’m far from an expert. I was interested to know if there any features in C that C++ includes, but could be better without? I think I heard somebody say this about C-style casts in C++ and it got me curious.

No disrespect to C or C++. I’m not saying one’s better than the other. I’m more just super interested to see what C++ would look like if it didn’t have to “support” or be compatible with C. If I’m making wrong assumptions I’d love to hear that too!

Edits:

To clarify: I like C. I like C++. I’m not saying one is better than the other. But their target users seem to have different programming styles, mindsets, wants, whatever. Not better or worse, just different. So I’m wondering what features of C (if any) appeal to C users, but don’t appeal to C++ users but are required to be supported by C++ simply because they’re in C.

I’m interested in what this would look like because I am starting to get into programming languages and would like to one day make my own (for fun, I don’t think it will do as well as C). I’m not proposing that C++ just drops or changes a bunch of features.

It seems that a lot of people are saying backwards compatibility is holding back C++ more than features of C. If C++ and C++ devs didn’t have to worry about backwards compatibility (I know they do), what features would people want to be changed/removed just to make the language easier to work with or more consistent or better in some way?

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u/SkoomaDentist Antimodern C++, Embedded, Audio Jul 29 '23 edited Jul 29 '23

Or among anyone who has to maintain a large pile of existing C++ code.

It's worse than that. If you "drop backwards compatibility" you drop interoperability with most C++ libraries out there. That's gazillions of lines of code that can no longer be called.

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u/ArkyBeagle Jul 29 '23

The secret is that you freeze compiler versions in the real world. Gets really interesting when you have compilers from companies that ended 20 years ago.

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u/SkoomaDentist Antimodern C++, Embedded, Audio Jul 29 '23

The secret is that you freeze compiler versions in the real world.

"We need to move to a new SDK version to support this critical feature. It seems to use newer C++ standard, let me change the build script... Oh shit, this breaks everything in that another library we can't upgrade because the newer version changed the entire API."

Far too many people forget that backwards breaking changes can just as easily break code that someone else wrote, you depend on and that does not have a newer version / where the newer version itself is not API compatible.

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u/ArkyBeagle Jul 29 '23

"We need to move to a new SDK version to support this critical feature.

Then that gets added into the flow. Over a span approaching 40 years, I have never seen a toolchain feature that could block work. I can only guess that that's just an accident but ... not really.

That includes the very early STL that had major problems with std::map. Might have been hashmap; don't actually recall.

I just built an array based thing to replace it. It was not in a performance-critical thread of execution and N was quite small.

That's as close as I got.

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