Friday, October 16, 2009
C++ in Coders at Work
Peter Seibel, author of Coders at Work, asked most of the book's interviewees how they felt about C++. Not surprising that most opinions were negative.
I haven't written a substantial amount of C++ code since I worked at Iris. And I have no plans to ever go back. That said, I used to enjoy C++, despite the complexity. But once we started to to use templates and STL it got really unpleasant, especially since our code had to compile on several different platforms. Dealing with C++ compiler differences between say, Solaris and HP-UX, is painful. And compared to languages like Java and C# which offer garbage collection, array-bounds checking, type safety, extensive class libraries, etc. C++ is generally more pain that it's worth.
I haven't written a substantial amount of C++ code since I worked at Iris. And I have no plans to ever go back. That said, I used to enjoy C++, despite the complexity. But once we started to to use templates and STL it got really unpleasant, especially since our code had to compile on several different platforms. Dealing with C++ compiler differences between say, Solaris and HP-UX, is painful. And compared to languages like Java and C# which offer garbage collection, array-bounds checking, type safety, extensive class libraries, etc. C++ is generally more pain that it's worth.
RSS 0.92 Feed