Use a dynamic strings library, like Postfix for instance, and everything else.
> C lacks good memory management.
So strange that you went for C++ for most of your code that is not immune of problems from this point of view.
I could understand that point if you were opting for a language with GC support. With C you can easily get better (that is, safer) than C++ native MM just building a reference counting system on top of your C "objects". This is trivial and it is what Redis, Tcl, C-Python, and many others are doing.
With Redis memory leaks or memory management never was a big issue.
> Error handling is optional and cumbersome.
Exceptions mostly suck, and in system software the only sane way to deal with errors is C-alike IMHO, that is, check the return value / error returned by every function and act accordingly.
> Encapsulation and other object-oriented features must be emulated.
This is not an objective point since many thing that this features are actually a problem.
Weak points IMHO, and C++ and Python with the minority of Python looks like a design error.
So I used to agree with you, but I've done extensive performance critical C development at Facebook (memcached, a new thing we are about to talk about) and I have also done extensive performance critical c++11 development (our layer 7 load balancer for http) and I'd have to say that c++11 is the far superior option if you really, truly understand what the compiler is doing to your code (a huge caveat).
Unique_ptrs are a total game changer, and the ability to use closures and lambdas when you want to set a callback function instead of a function pointer with a context pointer you have to cast and decode is absolutely huge for readability. maybe we aren't getting every last bit of performance out of it that we could with C, but it works at our pretty ridiculous scale, so I think C might have been a premature optimization for us.
First you are saying c++11 is the far superior option (with that one caveat) and in the last sentence you imply that C would still be faster.
Can you clarify?
I'll add my opinion too:
I think all the readability you can get out of c++, will be wasted in layers upon layers of object oriented design and C compiles much faster, so there is that.
C++11 is the superior option because it is easier to write correct code with it, plain and simple. And we aren't talking about orders of magnitude difference in throughput or latency, we're talking about a slight increase in CPU idle.
And layers upon layers of object oriented crap is also a problem in C (I've seen it). At the end of the day I've just been burned more by the complexities of building large things in C (particularly when people do reference counting in C) than I have been by the complexity of c++ in general.
C doesn't have a destructor that gets called when something goes out of scope. That's taken advantage of in C++ (RAII) to implement various things (like scoped_ptr that helps avoid leaks).
Refcounting is also not perfect for every case.
But I like and prefer C. ;) Just pointing out one thing different in C++.
Does anyone know of large projects where C++ handles memory allocation failures gracefully? For services that need to stay up and never crash under memory pressure, I would think C is the way to go. It's too hard to reason about control flow with exceptions.
You don't have to use exceptions in C++. You can do stuff the same way as in C by checking the return pointer.
I've worked on C++ apps that had built-in garbage collection (basically asset (geometry) paging) for huge amounts of data that would allocate/free/page on demand based on what was going on.
> String manipulation in C is a tedious chore.
Use a dynamic strings library, like Postfix for instance, and everything else.
> C lacks good memory management.
So strange that you went for C++ for most of your code that is not immune of problems from this point of view. I could understand that point if you were opting for a language with GC support. With C you can easily get better (that is, safer) than C++ native MM just building a reference counting system on top of your C "objects". This is trivial and it is what Redis, Tcl, C-Python, and many others are doing.
With Redis memory leaks or memory management never was a big issue.
> Error handling is optional and cumbersome.
Exceptions mostly suck, and in system software the only sane way to deal with errors is C-alike IMHO, that is, check the return value / error returned by every function and act accordingly.
> Encapsulation and other object-oriented features must be emulated.
This is not an objective point since many thing that this features are actually a problem.
Weak points IMHO, and C++ and Python with the minority of Python looks like a design error.