Walter's DConf 2014 Talks - Topics in Finance

[Paulo Pinto]

Am 21.03.2014 22:39, schrieb w0rp:
> On Friday, 21 March 2014 at 21:30:29 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> Heh, right before I read this, I stumbled across this snippet from
>> Miguel De Icaza's blog from a couple months back, where he regretted
>> using C++ to build Moonlight, their Silverlight implementation:
>>
>> "But this would not be a Saturday blog post without pointing out that
>> Cairo's C-based API is easier and simpler to use than many of those
>> C++ libraries out there. The more sophisticated the use of the C++
>> language to get some performance benefit, the more unpleasant the API
>> is to use.
>>
>> The incredibly powerful Antigrain sports an insanely fast software
>> renderer and also a quite hostile template-based API.
>>
>> We got to compare Antigrain and Cairo back when we worked on
>> Moonlight. Cairo was the clear winner.
>>
>> We built Moonlight in C++ for all the wrong reasons ("better
>> performance", "memory usage") and was a decision we came to regret.
>> Not only were the reasons wrong, it is not clear we got any
>> performance benefit and it is clear that we did worse with memory usage.
>>
>> But that is a story for another time."
>> http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2014/Jan-04.html
>
> That is a really strange argument. Let's break it down into stages.
>
> 1. Use C++ for better performance.
> 2. Find C++ library with better performance, but it's ugly.
> 3. Use C library in C++ instead because it's less ugly.
> 4. Conclude that C++ can't deliver better performance.
>
> That is really weak. This is why the industry needs salvation from C++
> with D. It would mostly be then, "Oh it has better performance with
> these template things... and it's not a pain in the ass to use."

I would take Miguel's comments about C++ with a grain of salt.

Back when I participated in Gtkmm (early 200x), there were the 
occasional C++ bashes coming from the Gtk+ guys and Miguel was never 
found of C++.

--
Paulo