Developers Losing Time on Unsuitable Tech
11 posts across 7 communities in the last 60 days; 36% from Hacker News.
“I don't see the point of most languages anymore except 3 of them because they excel in 3 different ways, 1 - Rust: Low resource, high performance, drivers. Works great with LLM's, except one big issue compilation time. It can and will replace C/C++ pretty much everywhere. 2…”
“The problem with Go isn't performance but with the C/C++ interop overhead, even with the "30% less overhead" from a few updates ago which isnt true for 99% of cases, it isnt enough”
“This is something that bothers me about languages that proclaim C/C++ compat because it's almost exclusively just talking about the ABI. I will say that Zig's build system is definitely one of the better ones, just look at the sqlite3 repo: it just points to the amalgamation zip…”
Many developers express frustration with being forced to use outdated or inappropriate technologies like C++ for modern tasks. This leads to wasted time, decreased productivity, and a general sense of dissatisfaction as better alternatives exist but are ignored due to inertia or network effects.
SOURCES (21)
“🤣🤣 fucking slop "coders". it is such basics that a C/C++ compilation will be tens of times smaller than a python mess. [re: Asked ChatGPT to code a FPS in less than 100 KB - Got One in 39KB After an Hour]”
“heh, I'm not sure of your particular beef with these two but I'll use this as an opportunity to explain my rationale.I obviously write a lot of code in Go but as a language it's also a really nice pairing with the IRC protocol. The way you write abstractions and tests just lends itself so well to writing desktop applications. On the other hand, writing UIs in Go (which I've tried in a multitude of ways) is just a really poor fit because asking Go to emulate Elm architecture is very clunky.From m”
“I don't see the point of most languages anymore except 3 of them because they excel in 3 different ways, 1 - Rust: Low resource, high performance, drivers. Works great with LLM's, except one big issue compilation time. It can and will replace C/C++ pretty much everywhere. 2 - Go: Low level , low complexity, parallel, network. Works great with LLM's, very low complexity, great compilation time. Even better than Rust at parallel workloads. 3 - Javascript/Typescript etc: They will survi”
“Hmm, I don't disagree with you that LLM's remove the need for type-safe languages, but as the blog mentioned, Google is porting their C++/C code to rust. Does this mean the port is waste of time and that they should just rely on the LLM's to catch memory errors?”
“The problem with Go isn't performance but with the C/C++ interop overhead, even with the "30% less overhead" from a few updates ago which isnt true for 99% of cases, it isnt enough”
you realise there's a programming language called C from 1972, right?
“I do think Go and Java are strong examples of this. Those languages have native code support, but it’s clunky to use and, more importantly, very rare.If you removed JNA/JNI/CGo, plenty of people would complain…but the vast majority of uses of those languages would still work, unaltered, because most common tasks on the JVM and Go runtime don’t require external native deps.”
“I know, right. There are plenty of reasons why a language is bad/good, but age ain't it. C is one of the oldest languages and it's still used for practically every OS kernel due to its simplicity and performance.”
“To be fair to the committee, upgrading C++ compilers is already a chore, even with the changes as small as they are. Would you rather spend time updating your lambdas because they changed how capture works (a real breakage not long ago), or doing something of actual value? The only reason we finally updated from Python 2.7 to 3 was that the OS vendors dropped it, but it was effectively a waste of time.That aside, I don’t understand why ABI breakage is a big deal. There’s probably a good reason,”
“C/C++ has "compiles but may have undefined behavior". Golang has numerous "compiles but has incorrect behavior" (normally known as footguns). Meanwhile with Rust, if you get past the compilation step, bugs become much much fewer. (You can still have memory leaks, but those are easily traceable).It seems like claude code can code Rust pretty well with Opus, and I've started moving codebases away from Golang to Rust at work with Opus. Spin up an LLM and it cranks on it for a while, and as a be”
“What are you talking about? None of it is relevant to the point i am making.Also you do not need COM to program in C/C++ directly on Windows API since they are all C interfaces anyway. COM is just an architecture you choose to use or not depending upon your needs.Ever since managed languages/virtual machines became "standard" programming platforms most Windows programmers only write to these. Everything is at such a high-level now that only curious programmers delve deeper into the rabbit-hole.”
“This is something that bothers me about languages that proclaim C/C++ compat because it's almost exclusively just talking about the ABI. I will say that Zig's build system is definitely one of the better ones, just look at the sqlite3 repo: it just points to the amalgamation zip and compiles it statically, meaning you can compile it with whichever flags you want. Even though I personally don't use sqlite, I cannot help but appreciate the simplicity. Whereas other systems languages with C/C++ com”
“I think there will be a proliferation of languages because it used to take a lot more skill to write them.”
“It still amazes me that Microsoft legally got away with C#. It's just Java with a couple tweaks.”
“I've already pointed out that there is no design flaw here, just an engineering detail plus a non-technical detail (standard vs implementation). Any systems language needs a way to call C functions, and the question of whether a native function is allowed to have the same name as a C function or not is an engineering detail, not a design flaw.Now, if we were to be talking about memory safety, that would be a very different discussion. But you only mentioned "minutia" as the problem with C and C+”
“> You should reassess how your current understanding of language popularity compares to what's actually going on outside your environment.He says as he then tries to prove it by showing rates of use and mentions inside programming bubbles, forgetting that we're talking about popularity. Time to step outside into the real world, away from screens. Many non-programmers who make up the vast majority of the population have heard of C++. Typescript is largely unknown.> "If you ignore the parts that d”
“> Although it turned out in the end that C++ developers actually wanted to use C++.Oof, I don't think so. It's just ridiculous how many things Google uses C++ for where something like Go or Java would be a better fit, and everyone I talked to agreed. No one liked C++ for search-like things.I think they just underestimated how powerful the network effects were. People wanted to use Go, but then it didn't have Flume support forever, so what can you actually do with it? And all the NLP libraries we”