Re: Rusty's message to C++ programmers (C or C++)
Ian Collins <ian-news@hotmail.com> wrote in
news:68antgF2qkckmU14@mid.individual.net:
dizzy wrote:
cr88192 wrote:
one has to give up many of the features, and is still faced with
many of the other technical issues, that IMO one is better off just
using C...
I completely agree. Once you start dropping features from C++
(templates, exceptions, RAII, references, function and operator
overloading) then you get an incomplete language, some sort of "C
with classes" (the horror!) so you should better use C then.
Why would you have to drop templates, RAII, references, function and
operator overloading in driver code? Exceptions typically require
some form of run time support, but none of the other language features
you mention do.
I don't know that you would have to drop them as a matter of course,
because you can actually get better performance with templates than
without. The problem comes when you want secure code. Templates have this
problem with doing different things depending upon the arguments and
parameters they are instantiated with. This makes them hard to reason
about and know exactly what is going to be generated. In secure contexts
this is enough of a problem that they are often banned entirely. I would
be interested in hearing if there are other arguments against templates.
Personally, I would think that your more algarithmic templates would be ok,
but as soon as you start doing metaprogramming with specializations etc,
then I would be more hesitant.
joe