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Comment by arinlen | Hacker News Reader

> The C++ standard currently sits at >1800 pages. Looking through these examples, I'm honestly horrified.

I feel you're embelishing too much your personal feeling of horror. The C++20 standard doc is a hair smaller than 1900 pages, but the complete core language is specified in the first 460 pages, of which around 100 are dedicated to templates.

Thus around 1400 pages of a 1900page doc are dedicated to specify libraries that throughout the years have been adopted by the standard. We're talking about stuff that was released with Boost and since then was deemed appropriate to make it standard.

Focusing on the 460 pages that specify the core language, most of this content has not been changed since C++98. The C++14 doc covered the core language with around 420 pages. Thus it makes zero sense to claim than suddenly C++ became horrifying because of the extra 20 sheets of paper you need to print out.

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You could focus on those 460 pages but I'll raise 2 points:

1. There's still a lot of complexity and ambiguity you can fit in 460 pages. This presentation notes one example of decrement operators on volatile variables being deprecated because the behaviour was undefined; and

2. Can you really separate the standard library from the language at this point? Things like move semantics depend on std. Does anyone actually use C++ without any of the standard library?

1. No, that's wrong. Incrementing a volatile isn't undefined. The problem is that some people are using volatile when they actually want atomic variables, so the behavior of the program becomes undefined when you have two threads incrementing the same volatile variable at the same time. The compiler might or might not compile volatile_variable++ into an atomic operation, but some people wrote code under the misunderstanding of the language that it always would.

2. Sure. While it's true that using certain features of the language technically requires parts of the standard library, those parts are very few and very simple. What is there? std::move(), std::pair and std::tuple, <typeinfo>, and perhaps a couple other things?

std::move is just syntax sugar over static_cast<T&&>(t) ; the language feature that needs library support afaik are:

- Overloading some of the "new" operators (need #include <new>)

- <initializer_list>

- typeid which needs <typeinfo> as you said

I don't see which parts of the language need pair and tuple at all?

I was mistaken. I thought you needed std::tuple for structured binding, but it seems the language can also destructure other types.

it's not that you need it, it's that when destructuring, std::tuple_size / std::tuple_element are implicitly checked to see how destructuring can be made to work if you have a type with some custom destructuring. (example: https://gcc.godbolt.org/z/5jq61oox7)

If they are not available or just not overloaded (e.g. when destructuring some basic struct) it just falls back to the destructuring one expects. So you need <tuple> for the specific case of implementing custom destructuring, that is one more case to add to the list :)

This whole thread is why c++ is..bad. It just leaves me with a sense of hopelessness.

You're being overdramatic. You don't need to be a language lawyer to use C++ correctly and effectively.

Which language do you use?

> This whole thread is why c++ is..bad. It just leaves me with a sense of hopelessness.

You've tried to force your personal misconceptions as some kind of gotchas that justify you irrational dislike for a programming language, and once each and every misconception you had was dispelled and debunked, your reaction was to double-down on your irrational belief.

This does not flag failures in a language.

? That's their only comment on the entire page.

> No, that's wrong. Incrementing a volatile isn't undefined. The problem is that some people are using volatile when they actually want atomic variables, so the behavior of the program becomes undefined when you have two threads incrementing the same volatile variable at the same time. The compiler might or might not compile volatile_variable++ into an atomic operation, but some people wrote code under the misunderstanding of the language that it always would.

What you're describing is a different long standing problem. The deprecation of compound volatile operations is because as volatile operations they were nonsense. A volatile operation is a single non-tearing fetch or store, but compound operations by their nature are both a fetch and a store.

By obliging users of volatiles to be explicit with the separate fetch and store, the intent was to highlight that this is not a single operation.

Abuse of volatile to mean "atomic" is so widespread it's how MSVC actually works by default on x86. Access to volatiles with MSVC /volatile:ms - which is default for x86 targets - means Aquire-Release atomic semantics.

Deprecating the compound ops doesn't change that in either direction, it's a bad idea, people, especially Windows developers, will expect it to work, Microsoft will enable it on x86 (but by default not on ARM).

1. The problem you've highlighted (pre/post increment of volatiles) is present in C, and hasn't been addressed there. This is a problem in c2x on compiler explorer for example. So i'd probably say laying this at the feet of the overly large C++ language spec isn't fair. I'm going to probably say it's been there since K&R C days (I think volatile was supported even that far back, but my memory is a bit hazy about such things).

2. This is a good point. I'd counter it by asking does anyone use all of the standard library in a project? If I were to include what i'd ever used, it's probably a subset of the standard.

I hadn't thought about std::move, and actually had to look up which header it's pulled in from, since it tends to get pulled in by other stuff i'm using!

Both the qualifiers const and volatile were new in ANSI C (which became ISO C89). In fact I believe the idea of type qualifiers in C is imported from (pre-standard) C++, thus it's Bjarne's fault.

The general idea (if we force the optimiser to emit the memory access then we can abuse that to do MMIO) is older than ANSI C and as I understand it begins when peephole optimisers begin to first make the "obvious" trick not work in C compilers, but I don't know when it became the volatile qualifier.

As in C++ the correct fix is to use dedicated intrinsics. JF Bastien wrote up C++ intrinsics for this as a template, obviously the C intrinsics would not be a template, but the general idea applies. In reality your hardware does not implement crazy nonsense like a 196-bit unaligned non-tearing memory fetch, so you don't need customisable intrinsics.

e.g. maybe C gets __volatile_load_64(ptr) and that's 64-bit aligned fetch from the address in ptr, there would be a handful you actually need for 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit, maybe 128-bit, loads plus stores and perhaps implementations are asked to offer any special cases for their platform, I can imagine unaligned 32-bit is plausible on x86 for example, maybe some DSP has 24-bit, that sort of thing.

The idea is the intrinsic emits the same CPU instructions which are what happens for volatile access today, but as intrinsics they don't give the false impression you can do other stuff, this isn't really memory even though the CPU instructions are memory access instructions.

Couldn't you still use move semantics without std::move? You'd just have to write your own cast to an rvalue-reference.

> Couldn't you still use move semantics without std::move?

That's correct, std::move is just syntactic sugar to cast objects to revalue references, i.e., the sort of object that is expected to be moved around.

> 1. There's still a lot of complexity and ambiguity you can fit in 460 pages.

That's a meaningless assertion and reads like a non-sequitur.

Your thesis is that modern C++ somehow became complex. Yet, the truth of the matter is that modern C++ is mostly comprised of formerly third-party libraries, initially released as part of the likes of Boost, that were since then added to the standard. The core language did received much needed improvements throughout the years, such as aggregate initialization with designated initializers, but the total sum of these changes barely grew the standard in around 5% of it's initial size.

Unless you come up with clear examples that you feel support your thesis, you'll have to scratch out your complains as irrational dislikes.

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