These days, a good use of C++ is for cross-platform GUI applications using Qt. Every time I need to create a GUI, I look around and always end up going back to Qt C++, there’s still no good alternative.
Why bother? because you can write more efficient code in less lines than C. Also a better type system. oh, and type inference and lambdas and other high level functional programming and generic programming constructs.
But yeah, if you want to do OO, might as well use smalltalk, or something more suited. C++ is a terrible OO language.
Lua + C has a better abstraction tower than C++. Put a small amount of orthogonal C at the bottom and a much higher level language at the top while seeing a 4x or more reduction in lines of code. Replace Lua with Gambit Scheme or some other compact high level language.
Die hard C++ programmers don’t want a C++ replacement. They just want (their pet subset of) C++ without header files so it doesn’t take so long to compile.
i’m cautiously optimistic about D - true, it’s just a “better c++” rather than a radically different c++ replacement optimised for gamedev, but since people are using c++ anyway, it will eventually become a case of “we can use whatever portion of c++ we’ve managed to batter into shape, or we can use D, where everything works more cleanly”. the mountain of existing c++ tooling is probably the biggest bottleneck to adoption, but from what i can see the D community is chipping away at that.
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These days, a good use of C++ is for cross-platform GUI applications using Qt. Every time I need to create a GUI, I look around and always end up going back to Qt C++, there’s still no good alternative.
Node Webkit is pretty good. Also from Intel is Crosswalk which is targeted at mobile HTML5 native apps.
Why bother? because you can write more efficient code in less lines than C. Also a better type system. oh, and type inference and lambdas and other high level functional programming and generic programming constructs.
But yeah, if you want to do OO, might as well use smalltalk, or something more suited. C++ is a terrible OO language.
Lua + C has a better abstraction tower than C++. Put a small amount of orthogonal C at the bottom and a much higher level language at the top while seeing a 4x or more reduction in lines of code. Replace Lua with Gambit Scheme or some other compact high level language.
We had a big discussion on the Rust subreddit, and the author even showed up: http://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/289enx/c0de517e_where_is_my_c_replacement/
Die hard C++ programmers don’t want a C++ replacement. They just want (their pet subset of) C++ without header files so it doesn’t take so long to compile.
i’m cautiously optimistic about D - true, it’s just a “better c++” rather than a radically different c++ replacement optimised for gamedev, but since people are using c++ anyway, it will eventually become a case of “we can use whatever portion of c++ we’ve managed to batter into shape, or we can use D, where everything works more cleanly”. the mountain of existing c++ tooling is probably the biggest bottleneck to adoption, but from what i can see the D community is chipping away at that.