logoalt Hacker News

nananana9 • yesterday at 11:14 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

Everyone reading this (you included) knows full well that unlike Zig/Rust/Odin/whatever, C++ has the special property that you can quite literally* write C code in it, AND you can implement whatever quality of life fixes you need with targeted usage of RAII+templates+macros (defer, bounds checked accesses, result types, whatever).

My comment is targeted towards the programmer who is excited about features like this - you can add an extra two characters to your filename and trivially implement those improvements (and more) yourself, without any alterations to your codebase or day to day programming style.

Replies

mort96 • yesterday at 11:32 AM

C in C++ is a pretty terrible experience. The differences your asterisk alludes to are actually quite significant in practice:

C++ doesn't let you implicitly cast from void* to other pointer types. This breaks the way you typically heap-allocate variables in C: instead of 'mytype *foo = malloc(sizeof(*foo))', you have to write 'mytype *foo = (mytype *)malloc(sizeof(*foo))'. This adds a non-trivial amount of friction to something you do every handful of lines.

String literals in C++ are 'const char *' instead of 'char *'. While this is more technically correct, it means you have to add casts to 'char *' all over the place. Plenty of C APIs are really not very ergonomic when string literals aren't 'char *'.

And the big one: C++ doesn't have C's struct literals. Lots of C APIs are super ergonomic if you call them like this:

    some_function(&(struct params) {
        .some_param = 10,
        .other_param = 20,
    });
You can't do that in C++. C++ has other features (such as its own, different kind of aggregate initialization with designated initializers, and the ability for temporaries to be treated as const references) which make C++ APIs nice to work with from C++, but C APIs based around the assumption that you'll be using struct literals aren't nice to use from C++.

If you wanna use C, use C. C is a much better C than C++ is.

➕ show 2 replies