Comment by plexchat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by plexchat | Hacker News Reader

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At PlexChat[1], we intend on using C++ to write a lot of our infrastructure (where it makes sense, that is). The language has advanced significantly in the last decade and writing idiomatically correct, and safe code, is much easier than it used to be.[2]

Garbage collection is certainly a part of it, but really, it's about programming with a deterministic runtime. Controlling memory budgets and doing things described in this talk is possible in an environment where the programmer has control, but instrumenting a blackbox runtime to identify performance bottlenecks and pain-points can be a huge endeavor. Other languages optimize understandability of the programming semantics (what is this algorithm doing) but do very little to aid in expressing runtime semantics (how will this algorithm execute on the machine).

[1] http://plexchat.com [2] https://www.jetbrains.com/cpp-today-oreilly/books/Cplusplus_...

> Other languages optimize understandability of the programming semantics (what is this algorithm doing) but do very little to aid in expressing runtime semantics (how will this algorithm execute on the machine).

I think this is painting other languages that aren't C++ with too wide a brush. There are many non-C++ languages that make it "easy" to control the low-level generated code (though I question really how easy it is with how incredibly aggressive in optimization modern C++ compilers are).

Other languages, not all other languages ^^. Yes of course there are several languages that map more directly to one's mental model of how code is executed. Rust (which you're working on) is an one such exception. Optimizations are certainly aggressive but the micro-optimizations are usually either well known (like NRVO, loop unrolling, function inlining), or not important relative to more costly operations that are occurring (allocations of heap memory, fetching from the heap, executing a system call, acquiring a mutex, etc).

C++ isn't the only language that offers such garanties.

What it is, is the 90's survivor of all wannabe C replacements.

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