C++ in Coders at Work

One of the topics I asked most of my Coders at Work interviewees about was C++. I am not an expert, or even a competent C++ programmer and recognize that my own opinions about C++ are not well-informed enough to be worth much.1 But C++ fascinates me—it’s obviously a hugely successful language: most “serious” desktop apps are still written in C++ despite the recent inroads made by Objective C on OS X and perhaps some C# on Windows; the core of Google’s search engine is written in C++; and C++ dominates the games industry. Yet C++ is also frequently reviled both by those who never use and by those who use it all the time.

That was certainly reflected in the responses I got from my Coders interviewees when I asked them about it. Jamie Zawinski, as I’ve discussed recently, fought tooth and nail to keep C++ out of the Netscape code base (and eventually lost). Some of that was due to the immaturity of C++ compilers and libraries at the time, circa 1994, but it seems also to have to do with his estimation of the language as a language:

C++ is just an abomination. Everything is wrong with it in every way. So I really tried to avoid using that as much as I could and do everything in C at Netscape.

Part of Zawinski’s issue with C++ is that it is simply too complex:

When you’re programming C++ no one can ever agree on which ten percent of the language is safe to use. There’s going to be one guy who decides, “I have to use templates.” And then you discover that there are no two compilers that implement templates the same way.

Note that Zawinski had started his career as a Lisp programmer but also used C for many years while working on Netscape. And he later enjoyed working in Java. So it’s not that C++ was either too high-level or too low-level for him or that he couldn’t wrap his head around object orientation.

Joshua Bloch, who also hacked low level C code for many years before becoming a big-time Java head, told me that he didn’t get into object-oriented programming until quite late: “Java was the first object-oriented language I used with any seriousness, in part because I couldn’t exactly bring myself to use C++.” He echoed Zawinski’s point about how C++ forces programmers to subset the language:

I think C++ was pushed well beyond its complexity threshold and yet there are a lot of people programming it. But what you do is you force people to subset it. So almost every shop that I know of that uses C++ says, “Yes, we’re using C++ but we’re not doing multiple-implementation inheritance and we’re not using operator overloading.” There are just a bunch of features that you’re not going to use because the complexity of the resulting code is too high. And I don’t think it’s good when you have to start doing that. You lose this programmer portability where everyone can read everyone else’s code, which I think is such a good thing.

Ken Thompson, who still mostly uses C despite working at Google which is largely a C++ shop, has had as long an exposure to C++ as just about anyone, having worked with with Bjarne Stroustrup, C++’s inventor, at Bell Labs:

I would try out the language as it was being developed and make comments on it. It was part of the work atmosphere there. And you’d write something and then the next day it wouldn’t work because the language changed. It was very unstable for a very long period of time. At some point I said, no, no more.

In an interview I said exactly that, that I didn’t use it just because it wouldn’t stay still for two days in a row. When Stroustrup read the interview he came screaming into my room about how I was undermining him and what I said mattered and I said it was a bad language. I never said it was a bad language. On and on and on. Since then I kind of avoid that kind of stuff.

At that point in the interview I almost changed the topic. Luckily I took one more try at asking for his actual opinion of C++. His reply:

It certainly has its good points. But by and large I think it’s a bad language. It does a lot of things half well and it’s just a garbage heap of ideas that are mutually exclusive. Everybody I know, whether it’s personal or corporate, selects a subset and these subsets are different. So it’s not a good language to transport an algorithm—to say, “I wrote it; here, take it.” It’s way too big, way too complex. And it’s obviously built by a committee.

Stroustrup campaigned for years and years and years, way beyond any sort of technical contributions he made to the language, to get it adopted and used. And he sort of ran all the standards committees with a whip and a chair. And he said “no” to no one. He put every feature in that language that ever existed. It wasn’t cleanly designed—it was just the union of everything that came along. And I think it suffered drastically from that.

Brendan Eich, the CTO of the Mozilla Corporation, whose Mozilla browser is written almost entirely in C++, talks about “toe loss due to C and C++’s foot guns” and when I asked him if there are any parts of programming that he doesn’t enjoy as much as he used to, he replied:

I don’t know. C++. We’re able to use most of its features—there are too many of them. It’s probably got a better type system than Java. But we’re still screwing around with ’70s debuggers and linkers, and it’s stupid. I don’t know why we put up with it.

At least among my interviewees, even the most positive comments about C++ tended to fall in the category of “damning with faint praise”. I asked Brad Fitzpatrick, who used C++ in college and again now that he’s at Google, whether he likes it:

I don’t mind it. The syntax is terrible and totally inconsistent and the error messages, at least from GCC, are ridiculous. You can get 40 pages of error spew because you forgot some semicolon. But—like anything else—you quickly memorize all the patterns. You don’t even read the words; you just see the structure and think, “Oh, yeah, I probably forgot to close the namespace in a header file.” I think the new C++ spec, even though it adds so much complexity, has a lot of stuff that’ll make it less painful to type—as far as number of keystrokes. The auto variables and the for loops. It’s more like Python style. And the lambdas. It’s enough that I could delude myself into thinking I’m writing in Python, even though it’s C++.

Dan Ingalls, who helped invent modern object oriented programming as part of Alan Kay’s team that developed Smalltalk, never found C++ compelling enough to use but isn’t totally adverse to using it:

I didn’t get that much into it. It seemed like a step forward in various ways from C, but it seemed to be not yet what the promise was, which we were already experiencing. If I had been forced to do another bottom-up implementation, instead of using machine code I would’ve maybe started with C++. And I know a couple of people who are masters of C++ and I love to see how they do things because I think they don’t rely on it for the stuff that it’s not really that good at but totally use it as almost a metaprogramming language.

Joe Armstrong, similarly, has never felt the need to learn C++:

No, C++, I can hardly read or write it. I don’t like C++; it doesn’t feel right. It’s just complicated. I like small simple languages. It didn’t feel small and simple.

And finally Guy Steele, who probably knows more about more languages than anyone I interviewed (or possibly anyone, period), has also not been drawn to C++. But he did go out of his way to try to say something nice about Stroustrup’s effort:

I have not been attracted to C++. I have written some C++ code. Anything I think I might want to write in C++ now could be done about as well and more easily in Java. Unless efficiency were the primary concern.

But I don’t want to be seen as a detractor of Bjarne Stroustrup’s effort. He set himself up a particular goal, which was to make an object-oriented language that would be fully backwards-compatible with C. That was a difficult task to set himself. And given that constraint, I think he came up with an admirable design and it has held up well. But given the kinds of goals that I have in programming, I think the decision to be backwards-compatible with C is a fatal flaw. It’s just a set of difficulties that can’t be overcome.

Obviously with only fifteen interviewees in my book I have only a sampling of possible opinions. There are great programmers who have done great work with C++ and presumably at least some of them would have had more enthusiastic things to say about it if I had spoken with them. But this is what I heard from the people I spoke with.

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1. I think I once managed to read all the way through Stroustrup’s The C++ Programming Language and have looked at at least parts of The Design and Evolution of C++. But I have never done any serious programming in it. I have made a couple attempts to learn it just because I felt I should but in recent years I’ve mostly given up, thinking that perhaps Erik Naggum, scourge of Usenet, was right when he said: “life is too long to know C++ well.”