Dearest C++, Let Me Count The Ways I Love/Hate Thee | Hackaday

Common issues like header-include order and link order, which can lead to circular dependencies, are some of such truly delightful aspects. The former is mostly caused by the rather simplistic way that header files are just slapped straight into the source code by the preprocessor. Like in C, the preprocessor simply looks at your `#include "widget/foo.h"` and replaces it with the contents of `foo.h` with absolutely no consideration for side effects and cases of spontaneous combustion. … If you got your code’s architectural issues and header includes sorted out, you’ll find that C++’s linker is just as dumb as that of C. After being handed the compiled object files and looking at the needed symbols, it’ll waddle into the list of libraries, look at each one in order and happily ignore previously seen symbols if they’re needed later. You’ll suffer for this with tools like ldd and readelf as you try to determine whether you are just dense, the linker is dense or both are having buoyancy issues. These points alone are pretty traumatic, but you learn to cope with them like you cope with a gaggle of definitely teething babies a few rows behind you on that transatlantic flight. The worst part is probably that neither C++11 nor subsequent standards have addressed either to any noticeable degree, with a shift from C-style compile units to Ada-like modules probably never going to happen. … ## Fading Love Don’t get me wrong, I still think that C++ is a good programming language at its core, it is just that it has those rough spots and sharp edges that you wish weren’t there. There is also the lack of improvements to some rather fundamental aspects in the STL, such as the unloved C++ string library. Compared to Ada standard library strings, the C++ STL string API is very barebones, with a lot of string manipulation requiring writing the same tedious code over and over as convenience functions are apparently on nobody’s wish list. One good thing that C++11 brought to the STL was multi-tasking support, with threads, mutexes and so on finally natively available. It’s just a shame that its condition variables are plagued by spurious wake-ups and a more complicated syntax than necessary. This gets even worse with the Filesystem library that got added in C++17. Although it’s nice to have more than just basic file I/O in C++ by default, it is based on the library in Boost, which uses a coding style, type encapsulation obsession, and abuse of namespaces that you apparently either love or hate. … Finally, there are some core language changes that I fundamentally disagree with, such as the addition of type inference with the `auto` keyword outside of templates, which is a weakly typed feature. As if it wasn’t bad enough to have the chaos of mixed explicit and implicit type casting, now we fully put our faith into the compiler, pray nobody updates code elsewhere that may cause explosions later on, and remove any type-related cues that could be useful to a developer reading the code.