• tunetardis@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    13
    ·
    6 months ago

    I started in C and switch to C++. It’s easy to think that the latter sort of picked up where the former left off, and that since the advent of C++11, it’s unfathomably further ahead. But C continues to develop and occasionally gets some new feature of its own. One example I can think of is the restrict key word that allows for certain optimizations. Afaik it’s not included in the C++ standard to date, though most compilers support it some non-standard way because of its usefulness. (With Rust, the language design itself obviates the need for such a key word, which is pretty cool.)

    Another feature added to C was the ability to initialize a struct with something like FooBar fb = {.foo=1, .bar=2};. I’ve seen modern C code that gives you something close to key word args like in Python using structs. As of C++20, they sort of added this but with the restriction that the named fields have to come in the same order as they were originally defined in the struct, which is a bit annoying.

    Over all though, C++ is way ahead of C in almost every respect.

    If you want to see something really trippy, though, have a look at all the crazy stuff that’s happened to FORTRAN. Yes, it’s still around and had a major revision in 2018.

    • aport@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      5 months ago

      C++ is way ahead of C in the same way that a metastasized cancer is way ahead of a benign tumor

    • RubberElectrons@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      5 months ago

      I just like that it’s relatively procedural. Assembly too. Classes etc are just not something I’ve needed… Yet.