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by userbinator 3865 days ago
If C++ "loses its performance advantages" it will entirely be due to the culture and not the language itself, because you can still do inline assembler in C++. I've long believed that the reason why lower-level languages have performance advantages is because their paucity of "rich" features means their users often find simpler, more efficient ways of solving problems.

I've noticed this even between C++ and C - without classes, inheritance, and so forth, you tend to think a lot more about whether you need something class-like before going ahead and doing it, and many times a simple function is all you need.

Adding new features almost certainly invites plenty of advocates who will opine about how much better they are (which is true in some situations), encourating their use, even if not actually necessary. This is problematic when these features make it easy to generate large amounts of inefficient code.

1 comments

People often think of C++ as a Object oriented language. That a very old fashioned way at looking at it. Most modern C++ code avoids OOP like the plague. For instance the author of STL (The C++ standard template library) calls OOP, philosophically unsound, a hoax.

http://www.stlport.org/resources/StepanovUSA.html