Tag: Software Engineering

According to Tiobe C++ surpasses C for the first time in history, The Streisand Effect works :)

In the world of programming languages, C++ has long been a staple, valued for its power and performance. However, it’s also been the subject of significant criticism over the years. Interestingly, these criticisms often have an unintended consequence, making C++ even more popular—a phenomenon known as the Streisand Effect.

Recently, C++ faced widespread criticism, with even the White House advising against its use. Ironically, this led to an increase in its popularity. According to TIOBE, C++ has surpassed C in popularity for the first time in history.

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Testing if the newcomer Llama3 is beneficial for c++ developers

AI has become prevalent in various domains, including software development. Many developers leverage generative AI to aid them in coding. Let’s explore the newcomer Llama3 and assess its suitability for C++ developers.

Related to Meta here’s a brief description of Llama3:

Our new 8B and 70B parameter Llama 3 models are a major leap over Llama 2 and establish a new state-of-the-art for LLM models at those scales. Thanks to improvements in pretraining and post-training, our pretrained and instruction-fine-tuned models are the best models existing today at the 8B and 70B parameter scale. Improvements in our post-training procedures substantially reduced false refusal rates, improved alignment, and increased diversity in model responses. We also saw greatly improved capabilities like reasoning, code generation, and instruction following making Llama 3 more steerable.

Certain developers may lack interest in AI generative tools due to their perception that the results are not yet mature. This sentiment is particularly pronounced among expert developers who swiftly identify areas for improvement in generated code. Nonetheless, I believe that for the majority of developers, generated code could serve as a valuable starting point for implementation, refactoring, or explanation purposes.

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C++ creator rebuts White House warning, but there’s no smoke without fire :)

In a March 15 response to an inquiry from InfoWorld, Stroustrup pointed out strengths of C++. “I find it surprising that the writers of those government documents seem oblivious of the strengths of contemporary C++ and the efforts to provide strong safety guarantees,” Stroustrup said. 

And Stroustrup cited a fact about the origin of the issue :

There are two problems related to safety. Of the billions of lines of C++, few completely follow modern guidelines, and peoples’ notions of which aspects of safety are important differ.

This highlights a significant problem with C++. When any programming language permits the execution of potentially harmful actions, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a considerable portion of developers may misuse it.

And when confronted about writing bad code, developers may offer various arguments to justify their actions, though these are often excuses rather than valid reasons:

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What attempts have been made to bring memory safety to C++?

C++ is a powerful and widely used programming language known for its flexibility and performance. However, one of its historical drawbacks has been the lack of built-in memory safety features, which can lead to various types of memory-related bugs such as buffer overflows, dangling pointers, and memory leaks.

This is a known issue that has persisted for decades, and numerous attempts have been made to find a solution. Unfortunately, none have succeeded.

What has been done in the past to enhance memory safety within the language?

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