| ▲ | WCSTombs 5 days ago | |
Good article overall. There's one part I don't really agree with: > Here’s a rule of thumb I like to follow for C++: make it look as much like C as you possibly can, and avoid using too many advanced features of the language unless you really need to. This has me scratching my head a bit. In spite of C++ being nearly a superset of C, they are very different languages, and idiomatic C++ doesn't look very much like C. In fact, I'd argue that most of the stuff C++ adds to C allows you to write code that's much cleaner than the equivalent C code, if you use it the intended way. The one big exception I can think of is template metaprogramming, since the template code can be confusing, but if done well, the downstream code can be incredibly clean. There's an even bigger problem with this recommendation, which is how it relates to something else talked about in the article, namely "safety." I agree with the author that modern C++ can be a safe language, with programmer discipline. C++ offers a very good discipline to avoid resource leaks of all kinds (not just memory leaks), called RAII [1]. The problem here is that C++ code that leverages RAII looks nothing like C. Stepping back a bit, I feel there may be a more fundamental fallacy in this "C++ is Hard to Read" section in that the author seems to be saying that C++ can be hard to read for people who don't know the language well, and that this is a problem that should be addressed. This could be a little controversial, but in my opinion you shouldn't target your code to the level of programmers who don't know the language well. I think that's ultimately neither good for the code nor good for other programmers. I'm definitely not an expert on all the corners of C++, but I wouldn't avoid features I am familiar with just because other programmers might not be. | ||