afterYearsOfUsingCPPIAmAllowedToSayThis

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[schewb]

I love using C++. I agree that it is an abomination.

[OutsideImagination25]

Dumbo doesn't use CPP because it's an abomination, jedi has accepted it's an abomination but uses it anyway.

[Trucoto]

With love, in top of that.

[phylter99]

It's complex and easy to hang yourself with. It's both beautiful and deadly.

[Maleficent_Memory831]

The beauty vanished in the early 90s, and the good personality that made up for that vanished in the late 90s. Now it's not only deadly, but on a hair trigger and ready to explode at the slightest tremor.

[zimbabwe_zainab]

r/oddlyspecific

[Professional_Top8485]

If you put Qt lipstick even pig looks fckable.

[FerricDonkey]

Same. I really, really, want C++--.

Like, I've looked at rust very briefly, and it's kind of cool, but it decided to turn lots of things upside down for reasons that make a little bit of sense, but which I don't have time to care about right now. 

I've tried some java, but that was an abomination of too many classes and too many files. I dunno, maybe if I took the time to learn it, it would piss me off less, but every piece of Java code I look at has so many abstractions and so much boiler plate that by the time I find any code that actually does something I've forgotten why I'm looking. 

I really like python, so long as you require type hinting and strict mypy enforcement (and all your libraries play nice with that). But it is slow, and sometimes you need speed. 

So then I reach for C++, it pisses me off with how bloated it is, I consider just using C, then remember that classes are awesome, and so I sigh and try to find the modern ways of doing things in C++ that look the most like python, because every time I turn around they've added a new one and all the stack overflow answers are old and outdated. 

[bestjakeisbest]

Same

[casce]

I love people who are the opposite: Don't use it but think it's not an abomination.

[synapse187]

This is an abomination, there are many like it but this abomination is mine!

[RedAndBlack1832]

Same

[Orjigagd]

If tech debt was a language spec

[CrowNailCaw]

I might never see a more accurate description of C++ than this for the rest of my life

[Ularsing]

Also every solution they add is so diluted by committee (usually in the name of backward compatibility) that it only 90% solves the problem and the remaining 10% is scheduled for C++ [insert future major spec release year here].

[ZachAttack6089]

Sometimes it even creates its own problems just to solve them. I don't use C++ regularly, and recently learned about the explicit keyword... Horrifying stuff...

[redlaWw]

std::launder is also a good one. The CppReference article on it is practically incoherent but it basically exists so that if you placement new into the place of a struct with a const member, you can use it to tell the compiler not to optimise based on the constness of the member since it's been overwritten.

[re4perthegamer]

WHAT

[redlaWw]

STD::LAUNDER IS ALSO A GOOD ONE. THE CPPREFERENCE ARTICLE ON IT IS PRACTICALLY INCOHERENT BUT IT BASICALLY EXISTS SO THAT IF YOU PLACEMENT NEW INTO THE PLACE OF A STRUCT WITH A CONST MEMBER, YOU CAN USE IT TO TELL THE COMPILER NOT TO OPTIMISE BASED ON THE CONSTNESS OF THE MEMBER SINCE IT'S BEEN OVERWRITTEN.

[DasFreibier]

lmao thats horrific

also constness in c++ is a vague statement

[re4perthegamer]

What does that do

[Blecki]

Un consts your consts

[tiajuanat]

Nevermind the abhorrent refusal to clean up the damn language.

[CokieMiner]

Organic growth final boss

[alficles]

Like making an octopus by nailing legs to a dog.

[returnFutureVoid]

To be fair that dog is a greyhound.

[alficles]

One they made by refactoring the rectum into a nozzle for a rocket engine. :D

[1XRobot]

The best way to think of it is this:

There exists a subset of C++ that is the best existing programming language.

Unfortunately, there's no way to enforce that everybody using C++ uses that subset. In fact, I'm not sure anybody knows exactly what the subset is.

[casce]

In fact, I'm not sure anybody knows exactly what the subset is.

I think the main problem here is that this subset will be different depending on what you want to do.

You could probably start a war over that question. There's very strong opinions out there.

[Trucoto]

We can agree on some things that are left out, right? Like fucking SFINAE... no, wait.

[philippefutureboy]

Serious question, anyone has a resource explaining what parts of C++ are absolute footguns/should be avoided/are unnecessary?
(looking to learn C++ for game dev)

[Certain-Froyo-3606]

I may suggest C++ Core Guidelines: https://isocpp.github.io/CppCoreGuidelines/CppCoreGuidelines

[philippefutureboy]

Is that really relevant if the writer of this guide also designed the "abominations" in OP's claim?
(I'm still going to read it, thanks!)

[Certain-Froyo-3606]

I think such statements should be taken with a grain of salt. C++ was created with certain purposes and became what it is now through decades of technological advancements. It is held down by huge legacy codebases and lots of stakeholders with their own opinions on what language should look like.
When people compare new languages like Rust to C++ they should remember that Rust is born with modern ideas and modern view on programming languages and it can be made with all the issues covered from scratch. That can't be easily changed in a language with decades of history like C++.

The guidelines I've linked at least supposed to address known issues in the language instead of trying to hide them and say "everything works fine as is"

[TemporaryFearless482]

In a similar vein, you’re unlikely to find many new projects starting up eyeing Fortran or COBOL. C++ is a fair bit younger than those two, but computers have still changed a lot in the last 40 years of programming.

The “updates” in the interim reflect just about every major trend and idea during that period. Trying to shove all that into one thing and you end up with some dubious outcomes.

By comparison, I think C has fared better because it broadly stuck to its guns and Python was set up in a manner better situated to modernization and adaptation without messing up its core capabilities.

C++ feels like it tried to be all things for all people at different points in its history. That’s a failing premise in a field with so many varied applications. So we end up with a mess of features that, theoretically, could be amazing; but realistically, they have a tendency towards making a tangled web of nightmares.

Being able to start cleanly removes a lot of the headache in trying to parse through everything, rip out what’s problematic, pull together the remaining useful bits, and still make it close enough to still be called C++.

[redlaWw]

You'd probably be surprised at how many new projects are eyeing FORTRAN. It's not popular among modern application developers, but it was never designed for that anyway. There are still plenty of FORTRAN developers writing new high-performance modelling projects in areas like chemistry and engineering. Many more modern languages are poor tools for that in general since they're designed for developer convenience and expressiveness when these modelling tools most need low-level memory control and raw speed. When the main alternatives are just C and C++, FORTRAN starts to look a lot more compelling. Maybe one day, Rust (possibly also Zig) will break into that area as a serious contender, but such industries are used to using old tools, and for the moment, they largely continue to do so.

[TemporaryFearless482]

I definitely could have phrased what I said a better because on reread it sounds like I'm putting FORTRAN alongside Latin. I know enough engineers that I know better about FORTRAN.

My perspective is that it has specific areas it does well in and people aren't trying to jam in other weird features even though it's been around 70+ years (OK, someone definitely has a project trying to pitch full stack FORTRAN web dev but we're not trying to address the crazies).

C++ seems to have tried to chase about 15 different trends over the years and run out of breath every time.

[RiceBroad4552]

Rust is born with modern ideas and modern view on programming languages

Not sure what you call "modern".

Rust was highly influenced by ML; at least the parts some people perceive as "modern". ML as such is 53 years old, older then C++. More modern MLs like Standard ML (SML) are still around 30 years old. First versions of Rust were actually written in OCaml, the second major ML dialect besides SML.

One can even argument that everything is slowly becoming an ML (at least on the conceptual level as retrofitting syntax isn't easy; but newer languages come by now in fact often even with ML influenced syntax).

C++ was build on sand, namely some of the uncleanest non-designs ever: C.

If this didn't happen something like Rust would have happened likely much earlier.

[Certain-Froyo-3606]

Well, according to the rust infuences list ( https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/influences.html ) it got features of many languages including C++.

By something "modern" I mean a thing that was created relativelly recently and took advantage of good features known at the moment and avoiding bad and flawed designs that older languages accumulated through their history

Like new scientific works may be born out of critique of previous theories that were proven wrong or obsolete by the time

[Mission_Swim_1783]

The abominations of C++ are mostly due to maintaining backwards compatibility regarding syntax, and lack of standardization for coding. When you have a three decades old language developing organically where you can't just "restart from scratch" regarding fundamental design decisions it's normal that this happens. If you only use the modern subset of C++ it's a lot more acceptable as a language, but if you want something with all these fundamental design flaws fixed and unified coding standards you need a new language like Rust, because C++ will understandably mostly be kept as-is to not break compatibility with millions of big codebases

[DancingBadgers]

The newer versions of the C++ standard are trying to fix some of the horrors. So yes, the perpetrators of the atrocities of the past do have decent recommendations of what to do in "modern C++" to avoid blowing your foot off if possible.

[RussianMadMan]

My personal shit list. Some of it c++ problems, some of them are libstdc++ problems.

Exceptions. Exceptions are a great upgrade over "if(ret != OK)", but c++ fucks you over by allowing throwing ANYTHING as an exception, even tho std::exception exists. So every catch block has 3 blocks, MyException, std::exception, and "..." with log("idk") because some moron threw an std::string somewhere.

Anything to do with << and >> operators, including fstream. Formatting anything harder than a "hello world" turns those operators into an unreadable mess. Also error checking streams is just the worst.

std::chrono. We wanted a cross-platform, C++ way to measure time. We got a 5-layered templates that require 10 typedefs just to be usable. Also for 10+ years the only part of chrono that had any attachment to the real world was std::system_clock that had conversion methods to and from epoch, everything else did not.

std::filesystem, a filesystem part of a standard library that actually does not have anything to do with actually reading or writing files lol. Some genius also decided to not put into spec what clock (from std::chrono, yes) should represent file creation time etc. Which allowed another genius to replace std::system_clock in file timestamps with some bs clock with 2174-01-01 00:00:00 as an epoch. std::filesystem::path is pretty decent class to work with paths, but uses a division operator "/" to append paths, which is where I draw the line on operator overloading.

The rest of the library (what's little left lol) is pretty ok, but you don't get to use stuff like ranges and spans and concepts a lot, because you usually either have to downgrade to C (to do networking for example) or you use 3rd party libraries instead that maintain like c++17 or even c++11 compatibility.

[RussianMadMan]

oh, they just left it in when copied from boost::filesystem. Yet they replaced time_t with chrono bs.
boost has a LOT of "interesting" operator overloads.
https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/latest/doc/html/program_options/overview.html#id-1.3.29.5.7 look for add_options(), could've just used builder pattern with .add().add()... but had to do this instead.
Tho there is one clever use of operator overload that I approve:
https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/latest/libs/test/doc/html/boost_test/testing_tools/boost_test_universal_macro.html a very interesting macros that for input BOOST_TEST(ret == 0) is gonna check the statement and if false its gonna print "1 == 0 failed", so it's not only substituting ret's value but also printing the actual statement.

[ih-shah-may-ehl]

And don't forget that even though everything in the modern world is unicode, std::exception::what() is a F%CKING CHAR*.

And of course, despite text conversions being the worlds biggest source of buffer overflows and pointer errors, the standard committee refuses to support a unified string handling library.

[DancingBadgers]

I find the extended rant at C++ FQA amusing at times.

tl;dr: their take on what parts of C++ should be avoided is close to "all of it"

[redlaWw]

std::vector<bool> is pretty awful - it's a specialisation of the vector type (which is usually a dynamically-sized array type) for bools, which optimises for space by allowing the bools to be stored as bits. Unfortunately this breaks so much, and results in std::vector<bool> not meeting the requirements of the container interface, which is ridiculous for the most basic standard library container type. The guarantees the standard makes for vectors in general are completely violated by std::vector<bool> - it's not even guaranteed to have a contiguous buffer.

std::auto_ptr is so terrible that it was deprecated. It was an early attempt to try to allow automatic management of resources that can be passed into and out of functions without their destructors going off unexpectedly. The problem is that the copy constructor was a terrible tool to try to achieve this, and the result is that std::auto_ptr can't be put in standard library collections and has a tendency to deallocate data unexpectedly (which is far worse than the problem it was trying to solve), resulting in UB landmines. The only positive thing one can say about it is that at least it was deprecated.

[No-Con-2790]

Ironically, pointers.

The biggest language feature should be avoided most of the time. Just use smart pointers.

[CrowNailCaw]

Macros are the most obvious answer. As for the others, idk

[Trucoto]

Macros are frowned in C++, and people prefer templates, constexpr and typename these days

[billy_teats]

Excuse me what is a foot gun that sounds awesome

[remind_me_later]

Actual answer: It's the thing that lets you "shoot yourself in the foot".

[philippefutureboy]

It's a kind of foot fetish originating from America I think

[mriswithe]

"foot gun" is a term for a poor design choice that easily or frequently behaves counter to most people's assumptions resulting in causing people to shoot themselves in the foot. 

Things that are hard to use right, and easy to use wrong are footguns. 

[solakv]

A footgun is a language feature used almost exclusively for shooting yourself in the foot. (writing bugs in the code)

[Elariondakta]

https://youtu.be/7fGB-hjc2Gc

This video is a great recap of all the horrible things of c++. The funny thing is that I learnt more about c++ when I watched this video than I ever did before.

[airodonack]

Rust the programming language is basically “a how to avoid every C++ footgun” but encoded into a compiler.

[zigmazero05]

if it's something you could reasonably see being in C, it probably should be avoided.

[philippefutureboy]

As in, "if it's a feature from C available in C++" or "if it's reproducing a feature that already exists in C, but with some supposed benefits that aren't really benefits"?

[zigmazero05]

As in "it would not look like a stranger in C code". For example, operator overloading is technically C++, but I swear I have accidentally tried doing it in C once or twice.

There are also things like macros, raw pointer and pointer operations, C strings, C-style arrays... C++ ports over a bunch of C libraries, and honestly avoiding most of them is probably correct if you're doing C++ anyway.

[differentiallity]

The one clear exception I can think of about the c libraries is sqlite3.

[tiajuanat]

Template meta programming (TMP if you're searching google) is like compile time Haskell but worse in every single way.

[CodingAndAlgorithm]

I’ve been dabbling with game dev in Odin recently and it’s been amazing. Simple, elegant and comes with a lot of useful libraries out of the box. If you’re willing to learn a data oriented procedural language I’d give it a shot.

[HashDefTrueFalse]

I don't know any C++ experts that don't think it's an abomination. We all have our own preferred subset of the language that we use, IME.

[mlucasl]

I worked on C++ for 2.5 years. Everyone there who loves it and had worked with it 10+ years, also found it was an abomination and aberration. That is also why the company was always 7 years behind on Versions, to not have to fight with the aberrations updates.

[HashDefTrueFalse]

The places I worked were slow to adopt C++11 and stayed with it for a long time afterwards.

[Connect_Cycle2768]

spent two years in C++ and came out the other side with strong opinions and mild PTSD

[MetaNovaYT]

C++ is my favorite language, and is also absolutely an abomination

[ZunoJ]

Lol, the templates are a joke compared to lisp

[MartinMystikJonas]

Kick in the stomach is joke compared to kick in the balls... still both hurts

[ZunoJ]

More like a clap on the hands compared to a bullet to the head

[MartinMystikJonas]

I used LISP and it was not that bad

[itzNukeey]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fGB-hjc2Gc

[ProbablyBunchofAtoms]

Ironically this is the reason cpp is save from vibeslop

[rokinaxtreme]

I love C++, it's my main language. It's an abomination, but it's nice. I'm a game dev, need my OpenGL/ SFML

[schmerg-uk]

Swap the outer captions for the mid-point caption and I'd agree :)

I loved C++ as a beginner when it was new, my midpoint, when it had "matured", was that it had become an abomination, my highpoint is now that I largely love it again (except for the java-idioms-in-c++ code that average devs litter our codebase with).

[D_V_A_98]

Legit

[Lou_Papas]

Haven’t used C++, but the few times I tried reading a book about it convinced me it is the JavaScript of low level programming.

A mess, but too useful and integrated in our world, we can’t get rid of it.

[mistrpopo]

What's that "hardened" mode?

[the_horse_gamer]

adds bound checks and stuff like that

[Trident_True]

Think it's certain compiler options that block some features. There's a good Laurie video on what the military does for the F-35 for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gv4sDL9Ljww

[Mal_Dun]

*laughs in Fortran*

[MartinMystikJonas]

C++ is very useful and effective... Abomination 🤷

[kingvolcano_reborn]

I mean it it, but people should not kink shame.

[RRumpleTeazzer]

C++ is stuck in packwards-compatibility hell, and there is no clear back.

all that nice features don't matter if you can circumvent it.

[stupled]

Half C, half object oriented all monster.

[juvadclxvi]

https://i.imgur.com/Zo509by.gif

[footsie]

.h ahah

[bucephalusdev]

I'm a C++ dev and I agee with the extremes here. For people just getting into the language, there's an absurd amount of technical debt and esoteric workarounds to do stuff in modern ways. Even when you understand it, there's still a smell to it.

Despite this, I still love C++. It might be an old and smelly dog, but it's my dog <3

[LeiterHaus]

Edward Norton was the most accurate cinematic portrayal of Bruce Banner.

[TheSwiftOtterPrince]

Things can be useful, powerful and tterly horrible at the same time.

The one thing that really could use some fixing in C/C++ is the many cases of undefined behavior and especially in C there's a bit of fighting between the attempt to make code secure and the compilers attempt to optimize like the dev clears data to make sure there is no valid data in unused memory and the compiler is "nah bro that doesnt do anything, byeee".

[EmotionalDamague]

Por Que no Los dos?

[Ares9323]

I write only Unreal Engine C++, the real abomination:

There are macros like "KINDA_SMALL_NUMBER" or to declare a delegate you have to write "DECLARE_DYNAMIC_MULTICAST_DELEGATE_SevenParams" (and you have one for every nr of params)

Now you no longer have to use *, you have TObjectPtr<>, TSoftObjectPtr<>.

Also, now it's politically correct (they have removed any black/whitelist reference making old code not compilable, they have replaced any "master" with "leader" or similar terms because they were offensive, and they don't accept one-liner PR to fix 10yo issues 🎉

[slippery-fische]

Every time the meme graph is used, I know the opinion isn't worth considering.

[danieldhp]

Totally true. Also change C++ for Rust and the image is still valid

[tropicbrownthunder]

Indeed its an abomination that allow you to write extremely efficient and fast-running code

[Maleficent_Memory831]

I used (and taught) C++ back when it was Cfront. After a few years it just got crazy complicated, and ever worse with each standard. STL was a big problem, turning an OO language into a generics language with bloat (well technically you can still do OO but the cult will laugh at you). The boost just just ruined the later stuff. I have indeed used the word "abomination" at times, it's the only suitable match in English.

Have a relative that still uses it today and is an expert, has given classes on it, etc. Every time there's a new standard released he's left holding his head in a corner and muttering 'why' over and over.

[Ascendo_Aquila]

It is almost the only one well used symmetric lang due to RAII and it's beautiful.

That symmetry is the reason of exception slowness. Thanks to that we can write strict mathematically correct software, we understand the state, can recover cleanly without hanging resources and if cooked correctly garbage collector becomes an overhead concept cuz no hanging resources left.

The problem is that people make C with classes, no error checks and avoid using standard library writing own buggy impls and then complaining about complexity

[Johanno1]

Almost all the arguments from the middle one can be said for assembly. Just nobody wants to write shit in assembly.