Date: Wed, 06 Mar 2002 10:37:31 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Nate Williams <nate@yogotech.com> Cc: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>, Kenneth Culver <culverk@alpha.yumyumyum.org>, "Steve B." <steveb99@earthlink.net>, "Eugene L. Vorokov" <vel@bugz.infotecs.ru>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: C vs C++ Message-ID: <3C8661EB.934CC478@mindspring.com> References: <20020305164151.T5854-100000@alpha.yumyumyum.org> <3C8529DA.FA8ABCE@mindspring.com> <4.3.2.7.2.20020306073237.00cd0b00@localhost> <3C8659BC.C2FD35ED@mindspring.com> <15494.23436.196349.224108@caddis.yogotech.com>
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Nate Williams wrote: > I can write C/C++/Java as good or better than most, and Java allows me > to get more done in a shorter amount of time than any other language. > And, not only that, my resulting programs are more reliable and bugfree > since I can spend more time worrying about the program, and not the > language itself. Your "resulting programs" are subjective to you. If you were the person tasked with doing the project, and I needed these attributes on the resulting code (likely), then Java would probably be the language of choice. But that's subjective to you. > I'm not saying that other languages don't also exhibit these > characteristics, but C++ is one of those languages that constantly gets > in the way. Rather than spending time solving the problem, I spend more > time worrying about the pitfalls of the language... Again, that's subjective to you. I've been doing C++ for about 20 years now, prefer to code in C still, for most things, but was able to finish ~22,000 lines of code in a period of four weeks (~550 lines of code a day) in C++ that then has had a total of 3 defects (two one-line and one four-line). I could not have done that in C, and I could not have done that in Java (I'm a competent Java programmer, though hardly 20 years worth, but 8 weeks would not have been enough). This is incredibly ironic to me, as the C++ code in question was a reimplementation of the Java APIs necessary for support of one of Sun's API designs for Java in C++, with the resulting high end code using the API (what the heck; if Sun is going to spend man-decades and millions of dollars developing an abstract model that's applicable to a problem I'm facing, I might as well use their model). So it's possible to implement the Java programming model in C++ (I even had full Exception class support). The other advantage is that the C++ code ran in a known, deterministic amount of memory on an embedded system; Java VM's, even Kaffe, seem to want to take at least 8M of memory. This could not have been done in Java, as the stream I/O abstraction broke the ability to have full data available before making a decision on interpretation. FWIW, the code was a better "fetchmail". The same project also served to show that a Cathedral builds significantly better code than a Bazaar. I already knew that, though, since Cathedrals require design to get right... when was the last time you say a yurt with a flying buttress? -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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