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Comment by BonusPlay | Hacker News Reader

C++ has lost touch with reality a few years ago. Modules, a feature 6 years old still only have partial support [1] and are nowhere to be seen in practical use. Good luck finding g a C++ library using modules.

This may be similar to Java vs Kotlin race, where Kotlin added improvements, while Java was still stuck in 1.8. The answer was to add as many features to the language as possible. Looks a bit like C++ is starting to do the same.

[1] https://en.cppreference.com/cpp/compiler_support

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> The answer was to add as many features to the language as possible.

Because Java is losing market to languages with many features. Which is good. Given history of Java under Oracle supervision, and the availability of Rust, Go and C#, I won't ever touch any JRE-based language.

Great, that means fewer bloated JVM based products will be released as well.

Only on Hacker News. In the real world Java and C++ are absolutely everywhere and no one uses Rust.

This. The discussions on this site are typically oblivious to this fact. I am desperately trying to persuade a corporate client to adopt version control and here people are talking about Rust. It's like we are living on different planets.

People who don't have version control in 2026 are not "everywhere" any more than people who still heat their home with a coal fire, or travel exclusively on horseback. Those people are weird. They do exist, but they're not "everywhere".

Rust is much less common than version control, but so is C++.

I don't think you live anywhere close to the normal world. It's like saying "all my friends have phds". I mean, don't everybody know three languages and basic multivariate calculus?

I have not in 20 years encountered a single company producing software, be it their primary product or a supporting role, that didn't use version control.

This was a thing in the early 2000s, but very certainly hasn't been the norm for a very long time now, at least in my part of the world.

If it's different where you are, you need to take immediate action and inform your company leadership of this extreme liability.

Selection effects are real.

https://xkcd.com/2501/ - of course there is an xkcd comic for this :)

I don't know about that. If you extend the scope to include Excel spreadsheet users, website designers, illustrators, writers and so on, version control is not common at all. Or they have something but it's a tragicomic parody of version control, such as what MS Word and Google docs provides.

That's a fair point, but now we're back to actually Rust makes better sense than C++ because the difference is much more stark if you're not already a programmer.

Some of the craziest things about C++ metastasised and are now everywhere in programming, so they don't seem as crazy - but if you're a non-programmer they will still be crazy in C++ and Rust doesn't have them.

For example why does "const" mean immutable? In Rust it means constant, like you'd expect. Why is "Hello" six units of storage space? In Rust it's five, because duh. Why does passing this HugeDoodad into a function expensively copy the HugeDoodad? In Rust it doesn't do that.

> The answer was to add as many features to the language as possible.

This is an exaggeration.

For me, C+11/C++14 made the language much more approachable and readable.

It was only that from then on, the language was to be updated regularly.

> Good luck finding g a C++ library using modules

There are, surprisingly, quite a few, including some very high-profile ones.

https://arewemodulesyet.org/projects/

Only if you accept using random 2 star github repo (that may come with free supply chain attack) instead of the maintainer supplied one with 60k.

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