It’s really surprising that a language I was using 20 years ago is now my preferred choice for a large set of problems today.

Early on, I really liked C++ for certain problems, but there were downsides.  I’d almost always take it over C; if used intelligently, it’s just as fast, plus I get some benefits.  The problems though were:

- lack of libraries
- memory corruption risk (and the toughness of these to debug)
- memory leaks

For a time Java seemed like the ideal solution for a certain sweet spot of problems in that the above problems largely went away.  Yet today, I’m not having these problems with C++!  And I get some advantages too (let’s discuss the advantages in a future blog post).  As to the above issues:

We now have a reasonable number of libraries for C++.  The STL exist which gives a bare minimum (wasn’t there originally).  More importantly, boost exists.  Boost is a great set of libraries.  Thanks to everyone who has worked on that project, it is very useful.  Could there be more libraries?  Sure.  But we have a good basic set now.

What’s really amazing to me is how having good libraries has changed C++ programming.  In the early days, lack of standard containers and such really meant a lot of C-style pointer manipulation and writing of data structures one’s self.  These days, that is unusual, and even when necessary is often done with smart pointer classes.  I rarely find stray pointer problems in C++ code these days for these reasons.

Likewise, memory leaks are a rare thing too.  With auto_ptr and other abstractions, it is pretty hard to fail to free something.  Sure, it’s possible, but I can leak memory in Java too by leaving a reference accidentally.

One thing I dislike about C++ is that to me, there is a fair amount of bloat.  It’s not a simple language.  However there is a good solution to that: don’t use things.  I try to keep C++ I write simple and not get too fancy with language esoterica.  A good example (not even that exotic) is avoiding multiple inheritance.