By Linus Torvalds:
On Wed, 5 Sep 2007, Dmitry Kakurin wrote: > > When I first looked at Git source code two things struck me as odd: >1. Pure C as opposed to C++. No idea why. Please don’t talk about portability, >it’s BS.
YOU are full of bullshit.
C++ is a horrible language. It’s made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it’s much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it. Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do nothing but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.
In other words: the choice of C is the only sane choice. I know Miles Bader jokingly said “to piss you off”, but it’s actually true. I’ve come to the conclusion that any programmer that would prefer the project to be in C++ over C is likely a programmer that I really would prefer to piss off, so that he doesn’t come and screw up any project I’m involved with.
C++ leads to really really bad design choices. You invariably start using the “nice” library features of the language like STL and Boost and other total and utter crap, that may “help” you program, but causes:
- infinite amounts of pain when they don’t work (and anybody who tells me that STL and especially Boost are stable and portable is just so full of BS that it’s not even funny)
- inefficient abstracted programming models where two years down the road you notice that some abstraction wasn’t very efficient, but now all your code depends on all the nice object models around it, and you cannot fix it without rewriting your app.
In other words, the only way to do good, efficient, and system-level and portable C++ ends up to limit yourself to all the things that are basically available in C. And limiting your project to C means that people don’t screw that up, and also means that you get a lot of programmers that do actually understand low-level issues and don’t screw things up with any idiotic “object model” crap.
So I’m sorry, but for something like git, where efficiency was a primary objective, the “advantages” of C++ is just a huge mistake. The fact that we also piss off people who cannot see that is just a big additional advantage.
If you want a VCS that is written in C++, go play with Monotone. Really. They use a “real database”. They use “nice object-oriented libraries”. They use “nice C++ abstractions”. And quite frankly, as a result of all these design decisions that sound so appealing to some CS people, the end result is a horrible and unmaintainable mess.
But I’m sure you’d like it more than git.
Linus
=====
Heath Provost ([email protected]) on 6/5/10 wrote: > >As for C++ exceptions - the same thing really applies here. >They are trying to write explicit code. Exceptions are the >poster child for implicit magic…
Yes, exceptions is a good example. The Linux kernel actually does its own exception mechanism, exactly because that way we control what is going on (and do it much more targeted to the actual need in question while giving much better performance and avoiding the crazy unwinding issues).
And I really do dislike C++. It’s a really bad language, in my opinion. It tries to solve all the wrong problems, and does not tackle the right ones. The things C++ “solves” are trivial things, almost purely syntactic extensions to C rather than fixing some true deep problem.
(The C++ objects, templates and function overloading are all just syntactic sugar. And generally bad syntax at that. And C++ actually makes the C type system actively worse.)
In non-systems programming, you should almost certainly use a language that offers garbage collection. That will possibly make a real difference in the complexity of your application. The C++ features? Largely useless, and just helps you screw up more.
And in systems programming, you’re simply better off with C. You’ll have a way easier time using all the existing code and libraries out there (re-using C++ code? Good luck). Fewer headaches, fewer opportunities to mess up the design and pick some unstable template library.
So in neither case is C++ likely the right choice.
Linus