Re: who read what c++ books and best learning practices?
Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For Email) wrote:
[snip] When I start Microsoft Word for
example, given the staggering progress in computing speed, today I the
program should be up and running practically the instant I lift my
finger off the mouse after clicking. Yet the blessed thing takes as
long
to start as its grandpa version on my old computer. Where in the world
did the 10,000x go? Did they manage to make Word 10,000x times slower?
To bring C++-related content into the mix: did the language become so
much more sophisticated? The old Borland C++ used to compile code
super-fast even projects of size similar to what I have today, on
dinosaur machines. I have no idea where the extra power went...
No, the programmers are becoming sloppier. For example, I just started
Limewire and checked peak virtual memory usage - a whoppping 50 MB. Of
course it's written in Java, but IMO, that's not an execuse. The
entire application could probably be written in under 1 MB of code in
C++.
And the C++ people seem to be getting lazier also. One can almost feel
the collective urge of many to just allocate at will and hope the
garbage collector cleans up the mess.
Then there are the libraries. One engineer makes a symetric cipher
suite out of C++ classes. They are tiny small, and fast. Another
engineer does the same thing, and there are XML schemas, UML diagraphs,
DLLs, .INI files, registry access, generaliized, generalized,
generalized...
The code has become so generalized, we are left with no specification.
And after there are 10's of megabytes in what should be a 1 megabyte
application, the real coding starts...
"Now lets see, where that function that takes a strings and returns to
me a pointer to a generalized container..."
-Le Chaud Lapin-
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