Re: OT: Is C++ doomed?

Hi

HardySpicer schrieb:
I have been reading that the .Net languages are taking over and that
c# will be the future if youcurrently program in c or c++. The reason?

well, many things are written. Some authors write their opinion, others their wishes and others that what they are told.

Development time is too long in c++. What is to be gained by a
language that few can program effectively in?

Most important is that there are enough people around that roughly caught the idea of the language and the environment. The older a language gets the more complexity it offers. And once in a while there comes a new guy that only understands half of the complex language. He tells us that his new language is only as half as complex and makes everything easier. And then the cycle starts anew. Of course, the new languages do not share all the dark sides of the older ones, and so there is still some development with time.
Look at Java and .NET. They introduced generics some time ago. And the complexity came. Still they are far behind the todays features of C++.

In my oppinion C++ is still one of the best languages around. It enables you to write abstract solutions with data separated from the generic algorithms. You can choose your memory management. You can program close to your hardware while still having the type safety of the high level language in most parts of your code. If you know what you are doing you can write programs with very low runtime overhead without to pass on modern OOP features.
Here we are in a dsp group. Garbage collecting languages like Java/.NET are completely out of place there, if you ask me.


The nice thing of course
is that all the visual .Net languages are compatable with one another
and they is easy to translate.

That is no practical advantage from my point of view. Its only nice for presentation sessions. Learning a new language takes an experienced programmer about one or two weeks at most. But learning a new environment or new programming techniques will take moths or even years.

Furthermore automatic transcoding is available for much more than only ..NET languages. Unfortunately that ends if threads are taken into account. As far as I know the required theory is not yet completely understood for multithreaded applications. But this may have changed in the last years.


Marcel
.