Thread: What's so great about C++?

[sarcasm]
good idea, putting a poll asking for your favorite language in a c++ board.
[/sarcasm]

i know it's been done many times, but what the hell...
i don't know what delphi is, so anything i might say about that is utter lies.

why is C++ so great?

it's a good language. flexible, portable, object-oriented, and yet somewhat low level.

What sets it above other languages?

it doesn't surpass any one language in doing something. it combines speed and low-level control with the benefits of a higher-level language, ie, objects.

Is it safe to assume that everybody likes it just because it is popular?

it's a safe bet, although not the whole story. it had to become popular sometime.

What ever happened to Perl

it's a scripting language, mostly. it's usually combined with another more general language for use in programming.

Delphi

no idea

or Assembly?

assembly is absolutely not portable. it might only work on one breed of x86 machines. if you're creating a program in assembly, updating it to conform to standards (or perhaps to make it more efficient) is a huge task. assembly is a bunch of instructions, mostly. modifiying a program in assembly is difficult, because every part depends on the conditions being right for that part. for example, a change needs to keep the registers the way they were beforehand. a lot of modifying could introduce many PUSH and POP statements that could slow a program down.

Wouldn't programmers rather program in assembly?

i can't speak for all programmers, but ... no.

Assembly is so much faster, the executables are so much smaller, and you have so much more control. You actually have a much better idea of what is going into your executable, unlike C++.

true.
[code]So tell me, why is C++ so great?[/quote]
because speed, executable size, absolute control over the computer, and a better understanding of the internal mechanics of the target computer is not necessary. in any language, code is reasonably fast when its written well and compiled. executables
don't need to be smaller. control is nice, but it's impossible to anticipate the target computer at times. besides, control and optimization sometimes distracts the programmers efforts from writing bug-free and working code.
this is just my opinion, of course. everyone is entitled to their language.

Didn't we just go through one of these posts? And don't you expect a wee bit biased reaction on your poll considering what kind of message board this is?

I use whatever language the current project calls for. I haven't really played with assembly too much, but I want to get into it. I seriously doubt I'd ever write a full, large scale app in asm. I'd like to use it inline in my C++ code to add a little speed (but more than anything just to learn something from using it).

Assembly is so much faster, the executables are so much smaller, and you have so much more control. You actually have a much better idea of what is going into your executable, unlike C++.

A big disadvantage of assembly is bad maintanability. A very good reason to use C++ instead of assembly is that is much better to maintain.

I believe that ASM is very portable. Its low level, so it can do anything(to my knowlege) I dont think that gaming engines are made out of C++ completely. I think ASM is very useful depending on what you want to create with it.

Everyone is so lazy? A game in C++ is going to run roughly 100,000 lines of code, and that's on the small end. Now how many lines of asm do you think that would amount to? And that 100,000 lines of code is greatly reduced from what would be needed without classes/structs. That much more in asm.

asm is not portable at all. Porting to different versions of Windows does not equal portable. The same C++ code can be ported from Mac, Linux, Windows, X-Box, Game Cube, etc. with minor changes in a well written program. Look at major cross platform games, then check out the postmortems in GameDeveloper mag, you'll see. asm is reliant on the type of processor. It's far from portable.