Item — HN Reader

> ... I am not willing to make the same wrong bet I did with C++. I sunk so much time into perfecting C++ skills ...

What are your top complaints about C++? What parts/patterns are wasteful, and must be avoided?

I have encountered C++ a couple of times in my career. And both those times I was barely able to survive in the short periods of time I spent in those jobs. I'm pretty good at C, but for the life of me, I just can't deal with the hidden behaviours of C++.

So far, I have seen only one example of well-written, understandable C++ code: LLVM. I dabbled in learning LLVM for a side project, and the tutorials on writing compiler passes, and the LLVM's own code, seems to use only the rudimentary features of C++ (primarily, single-inheritance). And this absence of complex C++ features made me feel comfortable looking at, reading, and understanding the LLVM code.

I am of the firm belief now that good code can be written in any bad language, and bad code can be written in any good language. Perhaps those couple of times that I encountered difficult C++ codebases, they were just instances of bad code, and should not be used as an indictment of the C++ language.

Good code => readable, understandable, maintainable, extensible, rewritable. Bad code => !Good code.

> LLVM's own code, seems to use only the rudimentary features of C++ (primarily, single-inheritance). And this absence of complex C++ features made me feel comfortable looking at, reading, and understanding the LLVM code.

Uh, what parts of LLVM were you reading? Because LLVM uses pretty much every C++14 feature allowed by their coding standard. The fact that you felt like no complex machinery was being used is actually a testament of the powers of abstraction in C++.