| IMO C++ was and is still the leading language for writing performance-intensive and memory-intensive applications (excluding Rust), and C++ is really flawed. Like, I know that Java and JavaScript and Python get criticism, but the fact is those languages are still usable compared to C++: - There are several different ways to do everything and half of them are wrong. For example, you can define an unsigned int type with "unsigned", "unsigned int", "uint32", "uint32_t", "unsigned long". Why are there 5 different types for unsigned integer? C++ also supports C-style arrays and pointers and casting, but most of the time you end up using std::shared_ptr and std::vector or std:array or static_cast or dynamic_cast instead. - Speaking of which, C++ is even more verbose than Java. Most classes will require 2 files, the .h and .cpp, and it's not exactly clear which code belongs in which. - The C++ compiler and parser is probably the most complicated compiler that ever existed. There is seriously no other language as complicated as C++. - C++ errors are very long, very verbose, and it's hard to even find where the error is. I literally had projects where I had a simple error (e.g. calling a standard library function with the wrong arguments), and I spent time trying to debug it because I couldn't even find the error location since the error messages were so long they went past the terminal buffer limit. - CMake is really bad. I can't speak much to how bad it is because I don't even really know how to use it despite working on multiple C++ projects. But I do know, trying to clone C++ projects with CMake they often fail, and that out of all the build systems I've worked with (including npm, Maven and Gradle), CMake is the one I still don't really understand. - The C compiler is also really slow. Static analysis is also not very good, even with the effort put towards it, because C++ is so complicated. - There is no easy way to declare a tagged union (excluding third-party libraries). There are also a few other features that Rust does which take a lot of boilerplate to implement in C++. - And on top of that, you have buffer overflows triggering security vulnerabilities. In conclusion, C++ is basically broken, which is why so much time and effort has been put into Rust. In fact, a lot of Rust design decisions (good error messages, simple package manager, tagged unions, the entire borrow checker) were put in precisely because of how badly they were handled in C++. Rust definitely has its own flaws, and is a lot newer and more unstable. But it's the best alternative that allows programmers to write performant and scalable applications which is not C++. |