JCjcbeard·May 18, 2016
I have a few problems with this article:
>structure leads to complex code that eventually brings down the most desired characteristic of a source code: easiness of understanding.
If done well, the structure of things like variadic templates make libraries easier to use, and make coding faster (granted, code bloat can be an issue with N different function signatures).
>C++ today is like Fortran: it reached its limits
Not quite. Fortran died because well, object oriented programming came out and lots of people like it. And well, C was always more popular regardless so...C-like C++ was the obvious next choice. There is a lot of cruft in any new library, so some things aren't as performant as if you wrote them in say assembly, which is what the author seems to suggest. Yes, if I built a bare metal iostream-like functionality it would be more
Read the rest
performant (ha, used the word :) ). People know iostream isn't that performant. Could it be better? Perhaps. Is it safe? Yes! If you want perf, use the C interface directly. Is that safe to use, probably not for the general careless user.
>To handle the type of speed that is being delivered in droves by the technology companies, C++ cannot be used anymore because it is inherently serial, even in massively multithreaded systems like GPUs.
Well, yes but so is just about every language. People are trained to write sequentially (left to right, top to bottom), with many exceptions...but none the less, sequentially. There are very few languages that do multithreading natively. There are lots of additions/libraries to C++ that enable very nice ways to consider parallelism (including w/in standard: std::thread), outside of standard (raftlib.io,hpx(https://github.com/STEllAR-GROUP/hpx),kokkos (https://github.com/kokkos), etc.). There are lots, some are quite easy to use. C++ is inherently serial, but there is no better way to write. It is fairly easy to pull out "parallel" pieces of code to execute. It is even easier if the programmer gets quick feedback (like the icc loop profiler,etc.) on things like ambiguous references and loop bounds that can be fixed quickly.
Interesting read, but don't agree at all.