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by eropple
5509 days ago
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> Compilation of C++ is really surprisingly slow. There's definitely something to what you're saying here. Or, rather, maybe something a few years ago. However, I don't think it really applies so much in 2011. Computers have gotten big and fast to the point where this argument is pretty meaningless. Personally, I stopped caring about compilation time when I got a 3.6GHz i7 with eight in-flight threads. I'm OK with feeding the beast on this one--what I get from C++ is defnitely worth it. (Debugging isn't particularly difficult, I find - you end up using a subset of C++, but there's no way in hell you could implement my subset of C++ in C and not hate working with it.) |
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Often you'll see a C++ basher bring up compilation speed and then in the same thread advocate python + C as the happy medium, which I find crazy. C++ is so much higher level than C the need for scripting is often obviated. I've typically got about 2x SLOC expansion rewriting perl/python as C++, including stuff like headers, so really not much more code at all, just 100x faster and a tiny fraction the memory.
The other line you see, including elsewhere on this page right now, is that C and C++ are the right tool for the job in different domains. I really don't get this. C++ is straight-up a replacement for C. There is no C program that wouldn't be shorter and clearer rewritten as C++. The only occasion to not use C++ is when you don't have compiler support, which is extremely rarely a concern anymore. Even the lowest level embedded stuff is moving away from C in favor of C++.