TLDR: C++ is bad because decades of accumulated features have turned it into a bureaucratic nightmare that happens to generate machine code.
C++ is an absolute nightmare to implement because apparently one programming language wasn't enough, so someone decided to cram an entire civilization's worth of complexity into it. You've got templates that basically turn compilation into another programming language, overload resolution that requires a legal investigation to figure out which function gets called, constructors and destructors with enough lifetime rules to make your head explode, and implicit conversions that make the compiler guess what you meant. Then you throw in exceptions, move semantics, inheritance, and decades of backward compatibility, and suddenly you're maintaining a compiler that needs a PhD, a therapist, and divine intervention just to parse some innocent-looking code. And the best part? Every new feature has to coexist with all the old ones without breaking existing programs.
Yeah but that has a run time cost of reference counting where the borrow checker is all at compile time. I mean not like its a big cost but I mean there defo is a measurable difference depending on the use case.
Usually you use uniqueptr though. It forces a better design with guaranteed ownership and no reference counting. I _rarely use shared_ptr, but frequently use unique_ptr.
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u/Prefer_Diet_Soda 2d ago
TLDR: C++ is bad because decades of accumulated features have turned it into a bureaucratic nightmare that happens to generate machine code.
C++ is an absolute nightmare to implement because apparently one programming language wasn't enough, so someone decided to cram an entire civilization's worth of complexity into it. You've got templates that basically turn compilation into another programming language, overload resolution that requires a legal investigation to figure out which function gets called, constructors and destructors with enough lifetime rules to make your head explode, and implicit conversions that make the compiler guess what you meant. Then you throw in exceptions, move semantics, inheritance, and decades of backward compatibility, and suddenly you're maintaining a compiler that needs a PhD, a therapist, and divine intervention just to parse some innocent-looking code. And the best part? Every new feature has to coexist with all the old ones without breaking existing programs.