Becoming harder? Last time I wrote C++ was in 2010 or so. There's so much new stuff I already consider it impossible to learn. It will become even more complex with this update.
I think it's not a coincidence that 99% of the complaints about modern C++ on HN are from people who...don't use C++. You don't get anything remotely like this tone of discussion on r/cpp or whatever.
I've been continuously employed as primarily a C++ developer since around 2001. The language was pretty bad back then, but it's been getting better and better since C++11. The vast majority of the new stuff is absolutely wonderful to use, a huge improvement in productivity and code readability.
Big +1 to this. Most of the changes to C++ have been fixing old problems. Concepts are a complex feature sure, but before having named concepts in code, we had unnamed concepts in code that may or may not be named in the documentation. Being able to name these things in code and get reasonable error messages from the compiler / just actually be able to understand it in my brain is great!
Same with constexpr. People used to do all sorts of stupid math / string concatenation in "template metaprogramming" to get compile time execution. Now they write (mostly) normal functions in standard C++ that I can actually read. The language gets more complex sure, but the code I read and write gets simpler.
C++20 is larger than C++11, sure. But for most users, it's simpler too.
> Most of the changes to C++ have been fixing old problems.
It will not fix all the pre-existing legacy code that people deal with on a daily basis. Languages are like infrastructure. People need to get it right on day one since it's exceedingly expensive to fix later on after people have already started to build on top of it.
I wasn't even complaining though. I'm just demoralized due to the extreme and ever increasing complexity. I don't feel like it's worth it to update my C++ skills.
My real complaint about C++ is the utterly insane ABI situation. Only C++ code dares to touch C++ code, no other language can interface with it without a C interface in between. The new standards forced even C++ compilers to break backwards compatibility with themselves due to requiring certain data structure performance characteristics. There is such a thing as C++ code that won't even work with other C++ code produced by the same compiler.
Could you explain what kind of projects nowadays use C++? I'm not up to date at all anymore. Used a lot of C++ until about 2010 (for simulations and Windows programming).
> Could you explain what kind of projects nowadays use C++? I'm not up to date at all anymore. Used a lot of C++ until about 2010 (for simulations and Windows programming).
All browsers you use are written in C++ (Firefox, Chrome...). Node.js is written in C++.
We live in that bizarre world, where on one side we have C, an antiquated and simplistic language and on the other C++ a monster of complexity that provides also basic modern stuff C will never have.
Rust has complexity of its own but it's more like a "philosophical" complexity rather than syntactic. A lot of C and C++ developers just don't like how Rust works.
High-performance database engines and similar data infrastructure are almost exclusively written in modern C++ these days. They benefit immensely from new C++ features.
Read Stroustrup's blue book written after C++11 was released. Not only is the font nicer than the white 2003 edition, it goes into sufficient detail to understand the new (now old!) features of C++11.
I've been continuously employed as primarily a C++ developer since around 2001. The language was pretty bad back then, but it's been getting better and better since C++11. The vast majority of the new stuff is absolutely wonderful to use, a huge improvement in productivity and code readability.