Warp wrote:
>   However, these ranters go ahead and generalize that this is the case
> with *all* possible programs. You should *always* use C# instead of C++,
> no matter what kind of program you are writing. Current computers have
> multi-gigabyte RAMs, so who cares?

This guy's ranting wasn't like that.  He repeatedly says "if you don't 
need that performance, use something safe. If you *do* need that 
performance, use C instead of C++. Or at least stay away from the deeply 
flawed parts of C++."

I don't think he disagrees there are such programs. It just looks like 
he disagrees C++ is a good solution for them. Or, more exactly, that the 
flaws and shortcomings in C++ don't make up for the power it gives you 
relative to other languages that have the same performance efficiency.

Me, I'll take C or Ada. :-)

> bits were wasted. I re-implemented the this class so that it would only
> store as many bits as necessary for each element. This meant that if,
> for example, the integers stored in this vector had value ranges between
> 0 and 100000, only 17 bits were allocated for each element, producing a
> saving of 46% in memory usage.

That's a keyword in Ada, see. :-) You declare the array "packed" and you 
get that behavior without writing any extra code.

>   Sure, there's no garbage collection and you can write out of string
> boundaries. Quite bad, sure, but I can live with that. I don't even
> remember the last time I had a bug related to that.

Yah. The problem is all the other folks one has to deal with. :-) If 
everything you're doing is nicely self-contained, that's one thing. When 
your job is interfacing half a dozen different things together, you 
can't really trust that there's no buffer overruns and so on.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     Remember the good old days, when we
     used to complain about cryptography
     being export-restricted?

Post a reply to this message