With all due respect for Mr. Sutter, his claim that C++11 is "as clean and safe as any other modern language, and still the king of fast", is simply false. Clean and fast are up to the particular developer and benchmark but safe is more objective, and C++11 is not safe.
- It is important for C++ to maintain backwards compatibility with previous versions, so C++11 supports C++03. C++03 is not safe. So, by definition, C++11 is also not safe. For those who are new to the term, safety generally comes down to how bad my program can screw up. Even a wrong Java application will not segfault the VM. C++11 adds some tools to make causing this behavior harder, but it is by no means impossible. C++11 still has pointers. It still has pointer arithmetic.
- "But", you say, "we are talking about just the features C++11 added to the language". Still false. Take
std::array, which was added in C++11. This code is unsafe:std::array<int 1> arr; arr[2] = 1;. And consider a lambda that captures a reference to a variable that goes out of scope. Perfectly valid C++11. Perfectly unsafe. - Threading in C++11 also allows you to do unsafe things. Just try modifying two non-atomic variables concurrently. You have no guarantees of what will happen.
- "BUT", you yell, "he said 'modern language' so...." Indeed, so? I'm not sure what Herb Sutter considers a modern language but let's just take some languages that are somewhat popular today:
- Java, C# - Considered safe.
- Clojure, Scala - On the JVM, so one would consider them safe.
- Python, Ruby, Perl - These are all considered safe languages. You cannot, without effort, access memory you should not.
- Ada - Hah!
- F# - Runs on .Net, safe.
- Ocaml, Haskell - The languages themselves are considered safe but you can do whatever you want if you drop down to C.
The problem, though, is that it's OK to be honest about C++'s lack of safety. That is the compromise I am agreeing to when I use C++. I want the benefits of it and I understand that I am making a sacrifice. I don't want to be told C++ is something that it is not. This "C++11 is safe" talk is nonsense and not a reflection of reality.
You can follow the discussion on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/xml97/c11_is_unsafe/
One problem is that there's no way to distinguish easily automatically safe code from unsafe code. If you start with safe code, you can easily make it unsafe, and sometimes non obviously unsafe.
ReplyDelete(I also find that you have a strange notion of "modern", which looks more like "recent" than "advanced"; eg. Common Lisp would be one of the oldest language amongst your list (standardized in 1994, only Ada was standardized earlier, in 1983), but it would still be one of the more advanced and safest of the list).
In Modula-3 and some other languages designed to do system programming as well as application programming, most of the language is safe: you can only use safe operators. But you can also write modules declaring them UNSAFE, were you can use unsafe operators (such as pointer arithmetic). Your unsafe modules must only export safe operations (you need to prove yourself or with the help of program provers that your exported operations are safe).
I believe John D Cook did a blog post that put forth the idea of separating C++ into two languages: Top C++ and Bottom C++. Top C++ would, for example, not have pointer arithmetic. Although it's unclear what op[] for a vector would be then. If Top is safe should we only be able to use std::vector::at? Or is safety just in terms of raw memory allocations? I don't know.
DeleteI'm not sure "modern" means "advanced". As I say, I also don't know what Sutter means by "modern" either, so I just gave a list of languages that have been getting some attention lately.
Thanks for the insight.
Cool post. Why no Facebook like button? Reach more people...
ReplyDelete