> Complaining about a language having features you don't want is silly.

It might be silly if you're working on your own. Software that delivers a lot of value is usually developed and evolved not only by team, but by a team with changing members and changing leadership over the project's lifetime. The features used will be the union of all features used over the years, and while it's easy for team leads to allow the use of more features than their predecessors, it's quite hard to reduce them.

Also, you may be forced to use language features you don't want if they're used by libraries whose functionality you do want. For example, when doing low-level programming, I don't like implicit calls that I can't clearly see on the page (e.g. destructors or overloaded operators). But if libraries I want use them, then I'll have those implicit calls. But if the language doesn't have those features, libraries obviously won't use them.

> It might be silly if you're working on your own.

That's exactly the case when it's easiest. If you don't need a feature, just don't use it and case closed. With a team it's harder - you have to force/enforce others not to use a given feature.

> if they're used by libraries whose functionality you do want

If you're using C++ you can just use the C library you would've used otherwise, no?

There are linters to do that enforcement automatically.

> Also, you may be forced to use language features you don't

This is quite important and often overlooked. An annoying fallacy is that people think some features are optional, but once they get heavily used, they aren't anymore. Often they quickly become an requirement and if you don't follow suit, your code is legacy or you are an idiot. But well, I guess I create legacy code upfront and the cargo cultists create modern code that turns into legacy next day.

> then end up reimplementing virtual interfaces manually

C++ dynamic dispatch (your "virtual interfaces") is achieved by welding a vtable onto every type and providing a pointer to that vtable for instances of the type. If in 90% of your code you deal with specific types like Goose or Swan or Duck or Seagull, and only 10% needs to work with the broad Bird category well, too bad, every Goose, Swan, Duck and Seagull carries around that vtable pointer even if it goes nowhere near that 10% of the system. This way your Bird code "just works" in C++.

That's not the only way to crack this nut. Idiomatic Rust approach uses vtables only in the Bird code, elsewhere they don't exist, and thus don't take up space in a Duck or whatever that's always a Duck, but in exchange now you're spending more time thinking, because by default there aren't any vtables and so dynamic dispatch isn't possible at all.

So while that C programmer has to implement features by hand, they are at least able to specifically implement the feature they wanted, not whatever was easiest for Bjarne Stroustrup last century.

C++ nudges you to think in terms of single elements. Operator overloading, ctors/dtors, references, etc. you pay that cost all over the place.

C programs tend to nudge you into thinking in terms of arrays of data.

For game development you generally want to think this way. The cost of vtables and all the cache misses doesn’t have to be paid. A game has to stream bytes. Many things at once. Rarely single elements at a time.

> by welding a vtable onto every type

It's not true. Virtual methods table is present only for classes with at least one virtual method. Learn C++ properly before doing such claims.

>C is not harder, you just have to implement modern language features by hand

That's definitely harder.

> C++ doesn't take longer to compile if you don't abuse templates.

Surprisingly, this is not true. I've written a C++ file only to realize at the end that I did not use any C++ features. Renaming the file to .c halved the compilation time.

I measured once and to my surprise templates aren't (directly) the reason for long compile times. It's function bodies in headers, and obviously templates are in headers and they call other templated functions/classes which explodes code generation and time. But if it's only a few lines and doesn't call other templated functions it's likely fine. I wrote about it here https://bolinlang.com/wheres-my-compile-time

After writing that, I wrote my own standard library (it has data structs like vector, hashmap and sets; slices, strings, rng, print, some io functions, and more) which uses a lot of templates, and it compiles in <200ms on both clang and gcc. Many standard library headers take much longer to compile than that. It's not a terrible idea to have your own standard lib if you need quick compile times.

Another option can be if you have a core set of headers your project will use (and is stable) just precompiling them.

Your website seems to be blocking Tor

Oh? I use a boring old $5 VPS (using nginx for https). There's no cloudflare or anything else involved. I wonder why that's happening. I may look into that this week

It could also just be down. I didn't try outside of Tor

I’ve seen this play out a lot. People say they “write games in C” and then quietly rebuild half of C++ anyway with vtables in structs or giant switch statements, just without the compiler helping. That’s fine if it makes you happier, but it’s not obviously simpler or safer. Also, C++ compile times are mostly a self-inflicted wound via templates and metaprogramming, not some inherent tax you pay for having virtual functions.

A switch statement is how you do ad-hoc polymorphism in C -- i dont thinks an own against C developers to point that out. If they wanted to adopt the C++ style that immediately requires the entire machinery of OOP, which is an incredibly heavy price to avoid a few switch statements in the tiny number of places ad-hoc poly is actually needed

You don't usually do C++ subsets if you want the full shebang.

I have a "mini-std" headerfile that's about 500 LoC implementing lightweight variants of std::vector, std::function, a stack-local std::function (unsafe as hell and useful as hell to avoid allocations), a shared-ptr, qsort and some other nifty stuff.

That does a lot of things, but even then I use other patterns that brings a lot of bang for the buck without having to go full C (hint: the stack-local function equivalent gets a lot of mileage).

This reads like an LLM generated response that simply restates the comment it's replying to

I think it is simpler and "the compiler not helping" == "things are more transparent".

  int a = 3;
  foo(a);
  // What value has a ?

There are various things one does not have to worry about when using C instead of C++. But the brain needs some time to get used to it.

I think I get what you're trying to say, but you may have picked a bad example, here:

  #define foo(a) a = 12

Yes, but this is more a theoretical problems while references are common in C++.

It's important that you do these things yourself before you utilise the compiler to do them for you, so you have real understanding.

> but it’s not obviously simpler or safer

On top of likely having worse performance.

C++ reimplements a lot of the things we do in C with function pointers, while hiding what's actually happening behind topheavy syntax that implies a 1990s object oriented paradigm that's dead now.

Contrary to popular belief C++ isn't really object–oriented. I mean, you can write object–oriented code, but the language doesn't make assumptions about what goes into a class. It's really just a struct with associated functions.

That's an odd opinion about a language with a lot of class related features. I can only assume you have a very strong definition of OOP.

OOP doesn't mean that your language has a "class" keyword, nor dot notation for calling functions.

Of course people do" virtual functions" in C, but I think this is not an argument despite C. I noticed that making virtual in C++ is sooo easy that people start abusing it. This making reading/understanding/debugging code much harder (especially if they mess this up with templates). And here C is a way - it allow but complicates "virtual". So, you will think twice before using it

For every person who says on the internet that you can just use a C++ subset, there's another who insists that C is the bad C++ subset. So compiling C code with a C++ compiler promotes your code from "good C code" to "bad C++ code" (most C code isn't "exception safe," for example).

It's arguably irrational to evaluate a language based on this, but you can think of "this code could be better" as a sort of mild distraction. C++ is chock full of this kind of distraction.

Yeah, you could argue that choosing C is just choosing a particular subset of C++.

The main difference from choosing a different subset, e.g. “Google C++” (i.e. writing C++ according to the Google style guide), is that the compiler enforces that you stick to the subset.

Linters etc... Validates the subset you're choosing to use for your project too.

C is not a subset of C++, there are some subtle things you can do in C that are not valid C++

Some subtle and some not so subtle.

C's string handling is so abominably terrible that sometimes all people really need is "C with std::string".

Oh, and smart pointers too.

And hash maps.

Vectors too while we're at it.

I think that's it.

When I developed D, a major priority was string handling. I was inspired by Basic, which had very straightforward, natural strings. The goal was to be as good as Basic strings.

And it wasn't hard to achieve. The idea was to use length delimited strings rather than 0 terminated. This meant that slices of strings being strings is a superpower. No more did one have to constantly allocate memory for a slice, and then keep track of that memory.

Length-delimited also super speeded string manipulation. One no longer had to scan a string to find its length. This is a big deal for memory caching.

Static strings are length delimited too, but also have a 0 at the end, which makes it easy to pass string literals to C functions like printf. And, of course, you can append a 0 to a string anytime.

Just want to off-topic-nerd-out for a second and thank you for Empire.

You're welcome!

One of the fun things about Empire is one isn't out to save humanity, but to conquer! Hahahaha.

BTW, one of my friends is using ClodCode to generate an Empire clone by feeding it the manual. Lots of fun!

And constructors and destructors to be able to use those vectors and hash maps properly without worrying about memory leaks.

And const references.

And lambdas.

I agree on the former two (std::string and smart pointers) because they can't be nicely implemented without some help from the language itself.

The latter two (hash maps and vectors), though, are just compound data types that can be built on top of standard C. All it would need is to agree on a new common library, more modern than the one designed in the 70s.

I think a vec is important for the same reason a string is… because being able to properly get the length, and standardized ways to push/pop from them that don’t require manual bounds checking and calls to realloc.

Hash maps are mostly only important because everyone ought to standardize on a way of hashing keys.

But I suppose they can both be “bring your own”… to me it’s more that these types are so fundamental and so “table stakes” that having one base implementation of them guaranteed by the language’s standard lib is important.

why not std::string?

You can surely create a std::string-like type in C, call it "newstring", and write functions that accept and return newstrings, and re-implement the whole standard library to work with newstrings, from printf() onwards. But you'll never have the comfort of newstring literals. The nice syntax with quotes is tied to zero-terminated strings. Of course you can litter your code with preprocessor macros, but it's inelegant and brittle.

Hacker News seems not to hate antirez's sds

https://github.com/antirez/sds

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45014911

It's a class, so it doesn't work in C.

Sure, but you can have a similar string abstraction in C. What would you miss? The overloaded operators?

Automatic memory accounting — construct/copy/destruct. You can't abstract these in C. You always have to call i_copied_the_string(&string) after copying the string and you always have to call the_string_is_out_of_scope_now(&string) just before it goes out of scope

This seems orthogonal to std::string. People who pick C do not want automatic memory management, but might want better strings.

Add concurrency and you more or less came up with same list C's own creator came up when he started working on a new language.

I feel like, for me, it’s that I am more familiar with writing in C and switching to C++ seems rather difficult. So, sure I am reimplementing features that already exist in anoter language, it just so happens in this case is C++. Why not use python if you want to avoid reimplementing the wheel as much as possible. And sure python is not suited for game development but I just wanted to make a point with it. I think in the end ising a language you are most familiar with results in the most amount of enjoyable coding.

For a solo dev, it's not difficult. C++ is nearly a superset of C. You don't have to adopt all of C++ to start using it and to get immediate benefits from it (for example, unique_ptr, shared_ptr, and vector would all be things that I think any C dev would really appreciate).

A reason I can think of to not move to C++ is that it is a vast language and, if you are working on a team, it can be easy for team members ultimately forcing the whole team to become an expert in C++ simply because they all will be familiar with a different set of C++ features.

But for a solo dev? No reason not to use it, IMO. It's got a much nicer standard library with a rich set of datastructures that just make it easier to write correct code even if you keep a C style for everything.

Exactly, not even do you need to religiously need stick to your subset, separate modules can be using supetsets that import useful libraries and if they're used for code that is seldomly changed (such as model importers) then the longer compile time will only matter for rebuilds and not quick tests.

I remember the creator of Kaiju engine stating something about C++ compilers producing slower code with C-style C++.

That's probably to do with exceptions — possibly the only thing that pervades C++ code even if you don't use it. The compiler has to write code so an exception at any point leaves the stack in a sensible way, etc. Try -fno-exceptions (and -fno-rtti might save some memory while you're at it)

Regrettably not every C++ feature is free if you don't use it. But there aren't many that aren't.

It's possible to use only a subset of the language. You could write a Java program without classes if you really wanted to. Just put the whole thing in main().

A lot of smart people pick and choose what they want from the language, just like religion, they keep the good parts and discard the bad.

main is also in a class in Java.

Even with the recent extension where it looks like it isn't, the compiler adds one for you.

> just to feel better about themselves.

Mindread much?

>Writing games in C is not harder, you just have to implement modern language features by hand.

I feel like if you need to implement modern language features, you shouldn't be using C. The entire point of C is to not be modern.