| 30 years ago I was discussing these arguments between those
using Assembly and those that dared to use C, Pascal, Basic and Modula-2 in home computers. 20 years ago I was discussing these arguments between those using C, Turbo Pascal and those that dared to use C++, Object Pascal features in Turbo Pascal/Delphi. So I still envision the day managed languages get to the next discussion cycle. > what exactly did .NET Native bring that presumably made it catch up to TP/Delphi? Static binaries, integration with the Visual C++ backed (it is not used in JIT/RyuJIT/NGEN). Pushing C# for more use cases where they still make use of C++. If you look at the C# 7 roadmap there are still more features coming into that direction. One of the reasons they made .NET Native, which came from Singularity actually, was that the C++/CX uptake is not take big. Most developers only reach out to C++/CX instead of C#/VB.NET for the APIs not exposed to .NET, like DirectX. I was a big fan of TP and eventually made the jump to C++, which is also very dear to my heart. But I would rather have a full stack language that offers me the safety of Algol languages, without C underpinnings. With .NET Native and the integration of System C# features into .NET, it is becoming quite appealing. |
Most of the people I know choosing C++ over C# are using it for the ability to get soft-real-time guarantees w/r/t performance. E.g. the gaming development guys have a "this next framebuffer ~must~ be done within 16.6 or 33.3 ms" or "I need a deterministic 'buy/sell/hold/not-enough-information-to-say-with-a-high-confidence-factor, defer-to-safety-net-policy'". At CppCon '15 most of the people I spoke to fell into a similar camp. I don't think I even spoke with one engineer who's day job involved using C++ because <insert CLR language here> failed to have interop capabilities w/ DX or what not. Of course, those who attend conferences will bias in a certain way so I'm not making an appeal to that demographic as in any way representative of the C++ user-body.
My assertion was simply : those who are using C++ are using it out of the benefits of predictable behavior. They can't afford that situaiton of: your GC won't decide this is the appropriate time to move all those marked as Gen0->1 over and oh by the way they're all a few bits big and fragmented so no pre-fetching help for you. What makes those guys different from the guys who were ASM guys who refused to use C back in the day is that the compiler eventually outperformed the hand-rolled stuff - but even then the ASM guys were steadfast. You make some real interesting points though and you're right - I haven't looked at the C#7 roadmap. Hell, to be honest I haven't even written enough code to take advantage of Roslyn's introspective capabilities. Thanks though, insightful comment as always. (Please keep on posting and don't disappear like the good posters of yesteryear (edw519, grellas, etc)).