Comments on: Why do you use C instead of C++?

By: Wolf

Wolf — Mon, 23 May 2011 10:39:08 +0000

Thanks for the link, Sorin. I didn’t realize the depth of the problem. It seems like most beginners I meet are interested in getting to programming GUIs as fast as possible. Javascript may be the easiest path to their ends.

By: Sorin

Sorin — Sat, 21 May 2011 03:37:25 +0000

You know, I got to this page after searching the web for the EXACT OPPOSITE: “why use c++ instead of c?”
My question was “what are the advantages of c++ that cannot be just more easily written in c?”
So I was surprised that most articles were actually discussing about “why would someone use c instead of c++ ?”

So before any more harm is done, and before any more casualties among the ranks of newbie/freshmeat programmers, and among the armies of programmers in general, I suggest you to have a good look at this article:
http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/defective.html

Hopefully this will convince new software “recruits” to stay away from C++, and either stick to C, or better yet to learn some useful high-level programming language like java, ruby, scala, or even javascript (which is a really great dynamic language, and can be viewed as superset of LISP – “LISP with named slots”)

By: Network infrastructures

Network infrastructures — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 08:41:12 +0000

Interesting article.I see no reason to use C instead of C++. Whatever you can do in C, you can do it also in C++. If you want to avoid overheads of VMT, don’t use virtual methods and polymorphism. However, C++ can provide some very useful idioms with no overhead. One of my favorites is RAII.Classes are not necessary expensive in terms of memory or performance.

By: Wolf

Wolf — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 06:25:33 +0000

You can definitely write windows programs in C. The Windows OS was itself written in "...C, C++, and C# for Windows. Some areas of code are hand tuned/hand written assembly..." - Ryan Waite - Product Unit Manager - Windows HPC ( social.microsoft.com/Forums/...) You can (probably) compile a C program with a C++ Compiler, but not the reverse (Geekinterview.com) Visual C, Visual C++, Visual C# are offshoots built on the C platform. Visual Basic is built on the BASIC language. All are Microsoft products, I believe, and all are supported by Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE. If you want to try out Visual Studio, check out Dreamspark.com

By: KK

KK — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 23:04:55 +0000

Wow, you are so smart guys!
So C is basically the same thing as c++ but it does not have classes?
So if you compile a C program in a c++ compiler will it work? Will you have to change some things or you will have to change it completely?
And also is there Visual C, like Visual C++, Visual C# or Visual Basic? Can you write Windows programs with C?

By: ?ukasz Krawczyk

?ukasz Krawczyk — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 23:16:47 +0000

C is not a functional language, it’s imperative one. Functional is not a synonym for procedural.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperative_programming

Object oriented and procedural paradigms are orthogonal in context of C language family, you can write object oriented code in C(you just won’t have syntax for it) as well as purely procedural code in C++.

Finally, the difference in speed between those two languages is caused primarily because C++ code tends to be more abstract, which leads to situations when it cannot be effectively optimized by compiler(memory aliasing trough pointers), so it is not only matter of using dynamic binding(polymorphism).