[jb1991]

Coding in C++ is very different than it is for C and you should not consider them similar in any way. They are now two very different languages and nearly all the idioms in common use in C are considered bad practice in C++. It has been many years since these two languages could be considered similar.

[joaquincabezas]

Exactly this. I've felt it while checking some C++ OSS projects, thinking "wow I am more Java than this, and I don't do Java". This prevented me directly jumping into C++ which would be the natural step coming from C (because in reality it's not the natural step)

[tialaramex]

One thing that surface tutorials in either C++ or Rust won't get at, which might worry your residual C programmer is: how the fuck can any of this be implemented efficiently on the machine ?

In C it often (too often actually but that's a different rant) feels as though what you wrote just translates directly into what the machine does, no surprises, so then it seems intuitively to make sense that this delivers good performance. And it's not anywhere close to obvious in idiomatic C++ or Rust, where yeah, "more Java" in some sense.

One option is to trust it, it's the fastest option as it's no work but you may find you can't bring yourself to do that.

Another option is to satisfy yourself by measuring, time it, or measure how big it is, now and again when you find something that seems like it ought to be dramatically worse - is it really worse? Huh.

The final option, which is very time intensive, is to learn the depths of how this actually works. That probably means learning assembly language, and a bunch of things about how CPUs work, how memory works, etc. If you never did this for C, I'd suggest not starting now as it's a huge time sink and is often going to shake what you thought you knew. But it's an option if you aren't satisfied by the other options.

[jb1991]

You are forgetting yet another option which is widespread and common practice among serious C++ developers, which is to use the Compiler Explorer to see how the code directly translates into machine instructions. It is almost normal to always have this open next to your IDE if you care about performance.

Note that most people who use Compiler Explorer don't actually know assembly that well, but you don't need to know it to see what is happening at a basic level, which usually suffices.

However, it is not necessary to care so much about performance in most cases. The language is generally fast compared to other languages, even if you don't try to make it fast -- the compilers and the language spec usually have that outcome. But when you really want to squeeze out the most efficient code, Compiler Explorer is the way most people do it.

[creata]

> Note that most people who use Compiler Explorer don't actually know assembly that well

To add to this, if you hover over assembly instructions, it'll give you a description of what they do.