It's ironic, but C++ does seem to be the best language to write portable code in right now. C is just too low level and everything else is either too slow or tied to one platform.
I don't get much of what you are saying here.. Any examples? Why would C code be less portable than C++? What C++ brings there that is more portable than C?
I would expect the opposite - some runtimes do not allow exceptions, RTTI, dynamic_casting, or simply ABI interworkings due to name mangling and calling conventions for methods. Also virtual inhertiance and it's interworkings (where the this pointer is stored, and how multiple virtual ihneritance is done).
For example: I currently develop my own musical software instruments. This requires a lot of custom DSP code that has to be fast and portable. My only real choice here is C/C++. C is definitely even more portable than C++ but it's too low level (IMO) for application development.
I like C, but you have to ask yourself why it's so rarely chosen for large-scale development. For instance, the Chrome team is certainly smart enough to write Chrome in C, but they chose C++. Why? Surely they understand the tradeoffs and the warts of C++ well enough to make an informed choice.
Firefox was written in C++, and WebKit too (coming from KDE). It could be that C++ is better fit for frameworks, while C for libraries.
V8 is also C++, but lots of other successfull VM's are written in "C"
I like "C" because it's more limiting, hence I won't see templates overused, or latest trick used (SFINAE). It's also easier for me to read.
Also at binary level things are simpler - here is your function, and it's name, it takes this and this as parameter, and returns this and that, also follows this convetion (stdcall, pascal, fortran, etc.)
With C++ my biggest pain has been name mangling. I'm not sure why this was not standartized. It's actually much better that the name of the function automatically contains what types it can take, which would've been much easier for dynamic binding, but then you have GNU, MSVC and others totally differs on how they mangle the name (and from version to version it changes a lot). Also exception handling (mingw/cygwin/msvc - there is big confusion there, and on binary compability level it's hard to combine one with another).
My last show-stopper for C++ was - on this platform you can' t use this feature. For example on certain game consoles exceptions are not allowed. So you go with longjmp/setjmp, but then this would not unwind the stack and call destructors.
Most of all, I got bitten by a heavily templated math library - it was much faster with optimizations than the one before, but without (debug) it was several times slower than same one before it. Why? Because it was relying on inlining everything, and back then gcc for playstation2 was not really inlining everything, even if it was forced.
So every overloaded operation (matrix by matrix, or matrix by vector) was actually function call.
There is another gotcha - sometimes overloaded C++ operators lose their ability to short-cut. For example overloading && and || would not longer short-cut, and many other gotchas.
Most of all, I can't stand boost - it's just too huge.
But I'm totally fine with C++ the simple way (whatever this is) - best example for me is ZeroMQ lib - it's C++ internally, they limit themselves to not use exceptions, and provide "C" interface by default. This makes it very easy to use from other languages - python, lua, ruby, etc.
Out of curiosity, which consoles don't support C++ exceptions? PS2? I would say it's a deficiency in the kernel rather than a language problem... but an understandable one, because the runtime support is tricky (see http://sourcery.mentor.com/public/cxx-abi/abi-eh.html).
You're right, a standardized mangling scheme would have been nice... but there's always 'extern "C"' if you need a C++ function from asm or a linker script.
Compilers really should short-circuit &&/||... were you using some kind of experimental compiler?
Yeah sure there are plenty of problems with C++. But I don't think writing in raw C is such a great answer either. What I really want is something in between but no such thing exists.
Same here... There is Vala, but just lazy enough to get into it.
My choice right now is Lua + C - for fun & experimentation. I also dabbled with Common Lisp, but haven't touched code in it in months, might get back at it later...
C++ is a superset of C, so being smart enough to write something in C++ usually implies the ability to write it in C, except with less language verbosity and much easier to read code without glyphic ampersands everywhere meaning different things @.@.
Then again, Linus said C++ developers were dumb and C was better.
C++ is not quite a superset of C, though most reasonable C code is valid C++. However, C++ includes a lot of facilities that make programming easier. They're easy to abuse, sure, but in most cases they help make things clearer and simpler.
Boost is almost a second standard library (it is one reference source used in the standards process), and it demonstrates a lot of what's cool and awful about C++. Boost invented a lot of the smart pointer classes that are now standard and save a lot of boilerplate that makes memory management in C annoying. Boost has things like Asio, which lets you write portable synchronous/asynchronous network code. On the other hand, it has Spirit, which is a massive abuse of operator overloading which is at once both impossibly complex and nifty/convenient.
Linus's opinion is worth noting, but he's hardly the best source.
I was about to say "Java!!!" then realized how misplaced that statement was given the circumstances. Oracle really is shooting themselves in the foot here.
I like C# although mono always failed to be nearly as good as .NET and that hindered C# a lot.
If microsoft had realized it and made .NET multiplaform as well, and open source, we may live in a different world today. Heck, Microsft could be leading.
But then again, rewritting the past is easier said than done.
