The irony of a blog posting of holier than thou, about security, then posting direct to the page where people have commented with tags for js popups.
secure your blog comments - amateur hour was earlier on this morning!
I can't avoid smiling when I see this. It is not that I don't have a love/hate relationship with C++ already or that I don't like Rust or Golang a lot but...
It gives me the impression we live all in our silos/caves and pretend reality is the same.
Working for an Enterprise Linux distributor that ships code for multiple architectures and support our code for a decade means Rust or Golang would fail the first round of questions: eg. Does it run on s390x?
Then I remember I am reading Hacker news and Macbooks are all x86_64 and software is rewritten from scratch every 2 months :-)
I bet somebody will bring up embedded/micro-controllers.
Or IBM's i operating system[1] (formerly i5/OS, formerly OS/400), for that matter. The enterprise world is chock full of machines that run on this, but I'm not expecting a version of Rust or Go that runs on EBCDIC machines in the foreseeable future.
Before a couple weeks ago, the last time I had used C++ was back in 1998, I think. I never enjoyed "C with classes" and I vowed to never touch it again. Last year, I attempted to put together a simple MNIST digit recognition program using plain old C. I gave up and did it in Fortran (working with matrices is SO easy!). Now, however, I've matured a little and realized that I really needed to get back into C++ and seriously use it. So I retaught myself the language using Stroustrup's Programming book (the one that has C++14) and his preferred methods (teaching the use of vectors early on is great!).
Now that I've approached the language in its C++14 mode and using good libraries such as Armadillo, I've come to the conclusion that all this talk about C++ being too low-level and too difficult is ridiculous. If you're not using libraries and programming in a higher level, you're not doing it right. I've been rewriting that digit recognition program and I've yet to declare a pointer or allocate any memory on my own. In fact, its so high-level that it almost looks like Matlab code.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 38.1 ms ] threadIt gives me the impression we live all in our silos/caves and pretend reality is the same.
Working for an Enterprise Linux distributor that ships code for multiple architectures and support our code for a decade means Rust or Golang would fail the first round of questions: eg. Does it run on s390x?
Then I remember I am reading Hacker news and Macbooks are all x86_64 and software is rewritten from scratch every 2 months :-)
I bet somebody will bring up embedded/micro-controllers.
EDIT: grammar
Or IBM's i operating system[1] (formerly i5/OS, formerly OS/400), for that matter. The enterprise world is chock full of machines that run on this, but I'm not expecting a version of Rust or Go that runs on EBCDIC machines in the foreseeable future.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_i
Now that I've approached the language in its C++14 mode and using good libraries such as Armadillo, I've come to the conclusion that all this talk about C++ being too low-level and too difficult is ridiculous. If you're not using libraries and programming in a higher level, you're not doing it right. I've been rewriting that digit recognition program and I've yet to declare a pointer or allocate any memory on my own. In fact, its so high-level that it almost looks like Matlab code.
The biggest ease of use issue with C++ is now getting good modern libraries for doing common stuff.