The New C++: Lay down your guns, knives, and clubs

@AC 22:16 GMT

Of course not.

Different standard bit widths on different platforms are key for performance - which is what C and C++ are about fundamentally. The standard says that int should be the standard bit width for that platform, and that makes sense because it will be the size all the registers are designed to operate with. This is why C (and to a lesser extent C++) dominate in embedded systems.

If you want to use types that are fixed across platforms, use int32_t, etc. (in C++0x) or the boost equivalents (before C++0x).

Many compilers are almost ready to go with C++0x, even before it has finally been standardised. Especially gcc where most of the features have been prototyping for years.

@Yawn

"Will C++0x have a consistent bit-width data types across CPUs? I bet not, given you need a language completely detached from C for that!"

Say what?

C99 supports (and has for the last dozen years!) consistent bit width types (int8_t, uint32_t, etc.). I would expect C++ to do the same (are you listening, Herb?)

You really need to get out more...

"Objective-C is kludge"... really?

"Objective-C is kludge which is only relevant to Apple platforms, thus irrelevant to most application developers. Apple is part of an expensive lifestyle fad and has a limited lifespan, so beware about investing much of your life with them."

Them's mighty strong fightin words.

Just a look by the numbers, ios is more popular than every current game console by the numbers. But being nice I added all of the original numbers to make it a 'fair' fight.

We have the nintendo brand at 602.42 million since 1974; the sony playstation brand at 369.8 million since 1994; the xbox brand at 79 million consoles sold since 2001; then we have apple's ios brand at 193.62 million since 2007!

Or nintendo at 16 million per year; sony at 21 million per year; microsoft at 7.9 million per year; apple at 48 million per year.

So by your logic microsoft shouldn't even be trying with the kinect! They should just shut down their games division because no one likes… um wait exactly how do you judge relevant?

-----(how I came by my numbers)-----

xbox at 24 million

http://web.archive.org/web/20080621155352/http://www.xbox.com/zh-SG/community/news/2006/20060510.htm

xbox 360 at 55 million

http://majornelson.com/2011/06/03/a-few-stats-before-we-head-into-e3/

ps3 at 50 million

http://www.scei.co.jp/corporate/release/110415_e.html

ps2 at 150 million (includes sell in)

http://www.scei.co.jp/corporate/release/110214_e.html

playstation and ps one at 102 million

http://www.scei.co.jp/corporate/data/bizdataps_e.html

psp at 67.8 million

http://www.scei.co.jp/corporate/release/110228_e.html

wii at 86.01 million

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii#cite_note-earnings_release_Q4_2010-42

3ds at 3.61 million

http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2011/110425e.pdf

ds at 146.42 million

http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2011/110425e.pdf#page=16

game cube at 21.7 million

http://www.webcitation.org/5nXieXX2B

N64 at 32.9 million

http://www.webcitation.org/5nXieXX2B

super nintendo at 49.1 million

http://www.webcitation.org/5nXieXX2B

nes at 61.91 million

http://www.webcitation.org/5nXieXX2B

entire gameboy line at 200 million

http://digital.asiaone.com/Digital/News/Story/A1Story20090423-137056.html

virtual boy at 0.77 million

http://www.gamepro.com/gamepro/domestic/games/features/111823.shtml

all iphone versions 108.62 million

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IPhone_sales_per_quarter_simple.svg

all ipod touch 60 million

http://thisismynext.com/2011/04/19/apple-sues-samsung-analysis/

all ipad 25 million

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/06/06/businessinsider-new-expectation-for-ipad-sales-8-million-this-quarter-2011-6.DTL

Absolutely

To quote Spideman, "With great power comes great responsibility."

A lot of people seem to forget a couple of points.

There are a lot of C++ 'coders' out there who still rely on the C elements of the language, who'll use raw arrays instead of an STL collection etc.... This is language abuse. Of course it causes problems when you are actually writing code in one language (C) but calling it another C++

You don't blame the car when a drunk driver has an accident do you?

For instance there was a famous class in an application developed by an ancient team at a place I worked. This one 'class' was 10 print pages long

Also you need to use the right tool for the job. When modelling vast, complex real world problems, such as mobile phone networks for example. You don't want to be trying to relate a bunch of raw arrays with each other. A well developed OO data model provides an easy interface for the the higher levels of the application to deal with.

We redeveloped one such application which although supposedly written in C++ did not make any use of a coherent OO data model possibly because it had to pass this data onto a discrete optimiser. This meant that adding a brand new technology to the network required a massive redevelopment. So to avoid having to do the same thing the next time a new mobile protocol was invented we re-designed.

By making use of templates, inheritance and polymorphism our data model could be viewed by the higher levels as a mobile phone network, but the actual optimiser only saw it as a collection of discrete numbers with degrees of freedom to be manipulated. Because of this multiple perspective view of the data we were able to negate the need to translate the higher level data to a view the optimiser could understand. This resulted in a 30% speed up which really makes a difference on an optimisation that can several weeks to run. Not something we could have achieved with Java or .net I believe.

It turned out there were quite a few 'c++' developers in the company who had never used templates and almost never utilised polymorphism or overloading and so found the solution very difficult to understand. We also supplied highly detailed UML diagrams & documentation of the model and there were also a lot of developers who didn't really understand them either.

The language though did it's job and provided us the tools to produce an efficient, extendable solution to a complex problem. In general It is the level of knowledge of the development community that lets the language down.

No doubt there will be C++0x programmers coding in C++ (and still probably C) for many years to come.

Hello Mr. Wells,

Cobol first appeared in 1959, C didn't appear until 1973.

So either you have access to a time machine, or have no idea about the history of computing.

also ...

Robinson: you also appear not to have heard of self-booting compilers. Its possible to build a compiler for any language in the language its intended to compile. Indeed a complete language should be able to build itself. OS's are like that too.

But I'm guessing compiler theory and machine code isn't probably your strong suit.

Here's a quick backgrounder: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_%28compilers%29