Why C++ is still my favourite language

With the advent of .NET the Microsoft camp is also moving away from C++ to a virtual machine driven architecture a la Java. When Java first came out the advantages were supposed to be memomory management and security. Garbage collection helped moved the mundane memory management responsibility away from the application developer to the virtual machine - or so the claim goes. Unfortunately people doing Java/.NET forgot to close files and database connections and had to go back to basics. .NET provided the 'using' feature that reintroduced deterministic destruction in a rather clumsy way. Besides the the try-finally syntax was supposed to take care of relinquishing resources (other than memory) that were not needed.



In C++ we use RAII. If an object encapsulates an database connection class then a database connection is opened in the constructor and closed in the destructor. No messy try-finally clause. Any good C++ programmer knows to take care of memory allocation using RAII. So memory management is less of an issue these days. The second advantage of C++ is the template programming. Generic programming in .NET is a pale shadow of template programming in C++. Here is an example:



template

class TContainer

{

T myObj;

public:

TContainer(T const& obj): myObj(obj){}

~TContainer() { myObj.CloseHandle(); }

};



Notice the 'CloseHandle' call in the destructor. This template demands that the class that T is instantiated with implement 'CloseHandle'. In C# (and Java too I think) a workaround can be provided for this simple case by casting myObj to a particular interface and then using the interface. But that's a runtime feature, and does not scale.



The one advantage of C# is reflection. In C++ we could query the typeid but we cannot traverse the entire set of methods and interfaces an object provides. This feature is used heavily in a number of instances including data binding as used by a GUI programmer. I am not quite sure why C++ does not do it. Even the dependency injection pattern cannot be implemented in C++.



Nevertheless, if you are going to develop algorithms, realtime, or even multimedia C++ is the way to go.