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by drnick1 146 days ago
> In low-level systems software, which is a primary use case for C++

I don't this this is true. There is A LOT of C++ for GUI applications, video games, all kind of utilities, scientific computing and others. In fact, I find that the transition to "modern" alternatives from native GUI toolkits in C/C++ has led to a regression in UI performance in general. Desktop programs performed better 20 years ago when everything was written in Win32, Qt, GTK and others and people did not rely on bloated Web toolkits for desktop development. Even today you can really feel how much more snappy and robust "old school" programs are relative to Electron and whatnot.
1 comments
saghm 146 days ago
To clarify, you think that low-level systems software is only a secondary use case for C++? The part you quoted does not make claims about whether there are other primary use cases, just that low-level systems software is one of them, so it's not clear why it being useful elsewhere is a rebuttal of that.
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TylerE 146 days ago
There are only so many OS kernels to be written. Nothing else is really low-level these days.
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saghm 144 days ago
I don't think I agree with that. To me, how low-level something is makes more sense sense as a spectrum rather than a binary, and there are certainly other things that I'd consider to fit into the lower end than just OS kernels. Over the summer I contracted for a company making satellites working on software they had that facilitated interactions between various software and hardware components that had to run a 20 ms loop for processing everything, with delays cascading throughout those other components and causing systemic issues. This was all in userland (the OS stuff was managed by another team), but a tracing garbage collector would have been pretty much a non-starter due to the potential to miss the expected timing of a loop iteration.

You could handwave this objection by saying it's not "really" low level or that "nothing" was an exaggeration, but at that point it seems like we'd be back to the original question of why it's wrong to say that this isn't a primary use case for C++.

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