Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghostwriter | Hacker News Reader

> If they’re saying that C++ can’t be saved, maybe they’re worth listening to.

It might be true, but it also sounds like an appeal to authority. I suspect there also might be voices that are being silenced or aren't given a similar platform to speak up and provide an alternative viewpoint on the matter within the same organisation, because <team budget/political reasons why>. After all, there are greenfield projects that are being started in C++20 and people are enthusiastic about their prospects. I wouldn't just blindly dismiss their reasons in favour of Google ones.

View on HN

An appeal to authority is a fallacy because it doesn’t actually mean anything. It’s false credibility.

If the authority comes along with a bunch of well researched and documented data from experiences in the real world… that seems worth listening to.

It’s no longer an appeal to authority. It’s just looking at evidence.

C++ is needlessly complex and puts too much of a cognitive burden on the developer. I just wasted a day of my life traced to an errant semicolon in a legacy cpp base. I've used the language for 20 years. It can't be saved.

No offense, but I haven’t heard if people wasting days in semicolons outside of memes and really junior developers. What was the issue?

In real-time systems with millions of lines of code, no debugging capabilities outside of logs, and user misuse use cases, you'd be surprised what can lurk beneath.

In my experience, a good, auto, code formatter helps alot. You can’t hide a semi colon from code formatter.

Are you suggesting a code formatter as a mechanism for static analysis? There are really good tools like coverity, and free ones like cppcheck and clang-tidy that will catch that and so much more. Using c++ without cppcheck and clang-tidy in your cmake and pipeline is like leaving the seat up. It takes so little time, and the benefits to others is great.

That said, they won't catch a ton of memory and thread safety issues. You'll need tests with 100% coverage for that. Or you could just write it in rust and the compiler will catch it.

If it was about a semicolon it even sounds more like running with not all warnings on. C++ is "bad" (shorting a lot) due to its compatibility being able to also compile last centuries code.. but if today on active code bases you are not even running with at least that, why would you ever switch to Rust?

And full agree, all what cppcheck does imo should have long gone into the warning suite, and Werror and Wall should be the default..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com