- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
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From Russ Cox
Lumping both non-portable and buggy code into the same category was a mistake. As time has gone on, the way compilers treat undefined behavior has led to more and more unexpectedly broken programs, to the point where it is becoming difficult to tell whether any program will compile to the meaning in the original source. This post looks at a few examples and then tries to make some general observations. In particular, today’s C and C++ prioritize performance to the clear detriment of correctness.
I am not claiming that anything should change about C and C++. I just want people to recognize that the current versions of these sacrifice correctness for performance. To some extent, all languages do this: there is almost always a tradeoff between performance and slower, safer implementations. Go has data races in part for performance reasons: we could have done everything by message copying or with a single global lock instead, but the performance wins of shared memory were too large to pass up. For C and C++, though, it seems no performance win is too small to trade against correctness.
I could talk for a long time about things I don’t like about C++. This type of stuff doesn’t even scratch the surface lol.
Years and years ago I actually wrote up a pretty in-depth blog post talking about it, even going so far as to show that it’s not even faster than the competitors once you’ve added in all this overbloated garbage that it calls a standard library. I wrote up a little toy implementation of some problem in C, Python, C++, and a couple other languages, and lo and behold then C one was faster by a mile and the C++ one using all the easier C++ abstractions was pretty comparable with the others and actually slower than the Perl implementation.