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I often hear these arguments about C++, but after having used C++ for almost my
entire career (and looking forward to use C++11) let me tell you why people
continue to use C++: because C++ is performant, and the alternatives don't give
you enough control over the internals. Yes, C++ is incredibly complex. Inherently much more complex than, say,
Haskell; due to the fact that C++ is far less consistent, has an hairy syntax,
and non-uniform libraries (a problem which is also shared by perl and ruby, due
to the language flexibility and rhetorical "best practices"). But C++ delivers! And while not better than Python, it still allows
higher-level programming than C, while attaining the same level of performance. While you probably don't care that python 3 (a language I also love) is overall
roughly 10% less efficient than the old 2.7, I need to figure out how to crunch
a dataset which is doubling each month, while CPU power is not increasing in
frequency any more. While your favourite language du-jour still needs to figure
out how to do basic multithreading, I'm actually exploiting it since decades,
including SSE and CUDA while I'm at it. Sure, the result is not pretty, but it
seems today that thrashing cycles "in the cloud" is not an issue anymore. Thank god I don't work in that industry. |