On the one side I really like c and c++ because they’re fun and have great performance; they don’t feel like your fighting the language and let me feel sort of creative in the way I do things(compared with something like Rust or Swift).
On the other hand, when weighing one’s feelings against the common good, I guess it’s not really a contest. Plus I suspect a lot of my annoyance with languages like rust stems from not being as familiar with the paradigm. What do you all think?
Depends on if you’re coding for critical infrastructure (i.e. - electrical grid), or writing a high performance video game that can run on older hardware.
We should absolutely have specific licenses like Civil Engineers do for computer infrastructure that is required for any software written for specific purposes. It would be a nightmare to implement, but at some point, it’s going to be needed.
Unless it’s some really exotic platform, I’d honestly still say no. Rust has shown that memory safety and performance doesn’t have to be a tradeoff. You can have both.
But sure, if whatever you’re targeting doesn’t have a Rust compiler, then of course you have no choice. But those are extremely rare cases these days I’d say.
There’s always a trade-off. In rust’s case, it’s slow compile times and comparatively slower prototyping. I still make games in rust, but pretending there’s no trade-off involved is wishful thinking
They mean a trade off in the resulting application. Compile times mean nothing to the end user.
That may be true but if the language is tough to develop with, then those users won’t get a product made with that language, they’ll get a product made with whatever language is easier / more expedient for the developer. Developer time is money, after all.
You’d be better just using a managed languages in many cases.
With tiered jit and careful use of garbage allocations they can actually be the same or faster.
I don’t even think we really need to eek out every MHz or clock cycle of performance these days unless your shipping code for a space vehicle or something (But that’s an entirely different beast)
We’ve got embedded devices shipping with 1GHz+ processors now
It’s just time to move on from C/C++, but some people just can’t seem to let go.
Battery life is a reason. I’ve had clients come to me complaining their solution from another vendor didn’t last very long. Turns out it was running Java on an embedded device.
Because there is still market for small mcus. A 1GHz processor is a lot more expensive than a 32 bits 75MHz. If you produce even a low number of units, the price difference can be huge.
That is the mindset that gives us text editors using 100% cpu to blink a cursor because their css triggers a bug in the web browser they ship to render the text editor.
You can be memory save without shipping a whole browser, but disregarding power and memory efficiency will just make performance gained by hardware evaporate in overhead.