From someone in the trenches using C++, I can definitely tell you that C++ 11/14 has made a massive difference, along with the adoption of better programming practices that have occasionally been eschewed by game programmers because of speed concerns. I describe the new C++ as feeling like C#, except with far uglier syntax. It's fantastic to be able to almost completely eschew the use of raw pointers (at least ones which I have to use to manage memory). It almost feels like the language has garbage colle
While it does make the language more complex to keep that cruft around, it's equally important to allow programmers to wrap up older libraries with newer interfaces, for example, and make sure the codebase still compiles cleanly.
The interview left me wondering if compiler warnings wouldn't be the way to go about that deprecation. That is, those old legacy features are still around, but raise a compiler warning. That way they're flagged and identified (and hopefully removed), but are still available to legacy code.
That would require compiler warnings to get more of an official status, though. I could certainly be wrong, but I don't think the C++ standard currently sets up any structure regarding warnings, either in their generation
I would say, deprecating the old style with warnings, is not the job of the compiler. This should be handled by static analysis tools, (which they do already). The compiler generally only emits warnings when it finds something dangerous, which the programmer probably didn't intend to do.
Good questions - interesting answers (Score:5, Insightful)
From someone in the trenches using C++, I can definitely tell you that C++ 11/14 has made a massive difference, along with the adoption of better programming practices that have occasionally been eschewed by game programmers because of speed concerns. I describe the new C++ as feeling like C#, except with far uglier syntax. It's fantastic to be able to almost completely eschew the use of raw pointers (at least ones which I have to use to manage memory). It almost feels like the language has garbage colle
Re: (Score:0)
While it does make the language more complex to keep that cruft around, it's equally important to allow programmers to wrap up older libraries with newer interfaces, for example, and make sure the codebase still compiles cleanly.
The interview left me wondering if compiler warnings wouldn't be the way to go about that deprecation. That is, those old legacy features are still around, but raise a compiler warning. That way they're flagged and identified (and hopefully removed), but are still available to legacy code.
That would require compiler warnings to get more of an official status, though. I could certainly be wrong, but I don't think the C++ standard currently sets up any structure regarding warnings, either in their generation
Re:Good questions - interesting answers (Score:1)