Comments by "Mikko Rantalainen" (@MikkoRantalainen) on "Bjarne Stroustrup: C++ | Lex Fridman Podcast #48" video.
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Great interview! The only question I would have loved to see would have been as follows:
If both Rust and C++ existed in their current state with no existing software written either language, why pick C++ over Rust today? I understand that when you have hundreds of millions of lines of existing C++ code, comparing just the language is not the only consideration you should do. However, we should be asking, which language is the best to teach to the next generation and the generation after that?
For me personally, even though I know C++ better, Rust seems like a better language in long run thanks to its memory safety and especially its data race free promise. Multithreaded programming is so hard when you mix in shared memory and allocating and freeing resources in multiple threads that it's rare that people can get that correct without a lot of support from the compiler. And Rust seems to be the only language that even tries to fully do this.
And I'm mostly interested in languages that have good enough performance. That basically rules out all garbage collection languages such as Java and C#. You only need to check the implementation of those languages to come to that conclusion: both JVM and CLR are written in C++. If Java and C# were actually generic languages, surely their own runtime systems would have been written in those languages, right? In reality, Java and C# performance is poor enough require writing the runtime in C++ (or C or Rust, but C++ was selected for historical or practical reasons).
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