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Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?"

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Siri Cruise <chine.bleu@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> On 28 Jul 2021 10:16, Juha Nieminen wrote:
> 
>> > In the 1980's and largely the 1990's, when OOP was the absolute king,
>> > dynamically allocating tons of individual objects wasn't really such a
>> > huge problem. CPUs didn't care how you were accessing memory, or how
>> > the execution flow of the program jumped around. Each memory access was
>> > equally slow regardless of which memory address you were using, and
>> > every conditional jump was equally slow regardless of anything.
> 
> So C++ but no OOP?

I suppose it depends a bit on your definition of "object-oriented
programming".

In the most traditional sense OOP means that your program has been
structured into classes and sub-classes, in other words, inheritance
hierarchies, and most often this involves dynamic binding (ie. virtual
functions). The abstraction that such an inheritance hierarchy
introduces implies that much of the code handles base class type
references/pointers, which point to dynamically allocated objects,
and which member function implementations are done with virtual
functions implemented in the derived classes.

Most GUI libraries implement very traditional OOP inheritance
hierarchies (I often like to say that it's almost as if OOP was
created precisely for GUI programming, because it's the most
prominent and perfect example.)

Of course, as it turns out, this paradigm is inefficient in modern CPUs
(because of caches, pipelines, predictive branching, etc.) The CPU
doesn't really like objects that are randomly placed in memory, thus
with data being accessed from random memory locations. It also doesn't
like branches it cannot predict. Or branching at all, especially
indirect branching. (Also, compilers have a hard time optimizing
code full of true function calls, because they can't see what the
function is doing, and it hinders things like autovectorization.)

Of course in C++ in particular there's a slightly better alternative
to this, which is to handle objects by value rather than by pointer.
This allows, for example, to put objects into arrays (ie. the arrays
don't just contain pointers to objects, but the objects themselves).
This isn't yet completely optimal, but it's a step in the right
direction.

Of course if you want to handle objects by value, you need to restrict
your object-oriented design. The pointer-to-base-object-handles-derived-
object becomes limited, and the use of virtual functions becomes more
limited.

You still can have inheritance, and a full inheritance hierarchy,
which makes it OOP-like, but there are some limitations.

(But, data-oriented design needs more than just being able to handle
objects by value. The problem with handling arrays of objects is that
the member variables you are interested in will be spaced out,
sometimes by more than the cache line size, which makes it almost
useless in terms of cache optimization.)

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"Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> - 2021-07-27 14:59 -0500
  Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Siri Cruise <chine.bleu@yahoo.com> - 2021-07-27 13:48 -0700
    Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Vir Campestris <vir.campestris@invalid.invalid> - 2021-07-27 22:05 +0100
      Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Keith Thompson <Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com> - 2021-07-27 14:23 -0700
        Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" legalize+jeeves@mail.xmission.com (Richard) - 2021-08-05 19:49 +0000
          Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Jorgen Grahn <grahn+nntp@snipabacken.se> - 2021-08-19 20:08 +0000
            Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Siri Cruise <chine.bleu@yahoo.com> - 2021-08-19 18:20 -0700
              Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Juha Nieminen <nospam@thanks.invalid> - 2021-08-20 06:13 +0000
              Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Jorgen Grahn <grahn+nntp@snipabacken.se> - 2021-08-20 06:17 +0000
                Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Siri Cruise <chine.bleu@yahoo.com> - 2021-08-20 00:03 -0700
                Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Juha Nieminen <nospam@thanks.invalid> - 2021-08-20 11:03 +0000
                Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" mickspud@downthefarm.com - 2021-08-20 15:19 +0000
              Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" "Alf P. Steinbach" <alf.p.steinbach@gmail.com> - 2021-08-20 14:26 +0200
                Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Öö Tiib <ootiib@hot.ee> - 2021-08-29 23:40 -0700
    Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Cholo Lennon <chololennon@hotmail.com> - 2021-07-27 21:01 -0300
    Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Juha Nieminen <nospam@thanks.invalid> - 2021-07-28 08:16 +0000
      Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" "Alf P. Steinbach" <alf.p.steinbach@gmail.com> - 2021-07-28 16:22 +0200
        Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Siri Cruise <chine.bleu@yahoo.com> - 2021-07-28 07:53 -0700
          Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" "Alf P. Steinbach" <alf.p.steinbach@gmail.com> - 2021-07-28 21:23 +0200
            Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Siri Cruise <chine.bleu@yahoo.com> - 2021-07-28 14:16 -0700
          Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Juha Nieminen <nospam@thanks.invalid> - 2021-07-29 06:53 +0000
            Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Öö Tiib <ootiib@hot.ee> - 2021-07-29 09:31 -0700
              Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" MrSpud_71i5@slwgrcbmd1l7yi1.org - 2021-07-30 11:21 +0000
              Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Juha Nieminen <nospam@thanks.invalid> - 2021-08-01 08:28 +0000
                Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Öö Tiib <ootiib@hot.ee> - 2021-08-01 05:49 -0700
                Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Juha Nieminen <nospam@thanks.invalid> - 2021-08-02 10:23 +0000
                Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" MrSpud_rLY23@_h_.co.uk - 2021-08-02 15:05 +0000
                Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Öö Tiib <ootiib@hot.ee> - 2021-08-03 04:57 -0700
                Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Juha Nieminen <nospam@thanks.invalid> - 2021-08-03 12:16 +0000
                Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Öö Tiib <ootiib@hot.ee> - 2021-08-03 06:01 -0700
                Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Ian Collins <ian-news@hotmail.com> - 2021-08-08 13:03 +1200
                Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" "Chris M. Thomasson" <chris.m.thomasson.1@gmail.com> - 2021-08-07 22:43 -0700
            Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Vir Campestris <vir.campestris@invalid.invalid> - 2021-08-01 21:40 +0100
          Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Chris Vine <chris@cvine--nospam--.freeserve.co.uk> - 2021-07-29 09:53 +0100
          Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Manfred <noname@add.invalid> - 2021-07-30 13:51 +0200
      Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Manfred <noname@add.invalid> - 2021-07-30 13:40 +0200
  Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Bonita Montero <Bonita.Montero@gmail.com> - 2021-07-28 04:05 +0200
    Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" MrSpud_oyam9ltRb0@khlkg.info - 2021-07-28 09:30 +0000
  Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Bo Persson <bo@bo-persson.se> - 2021-07-28 08:19 +0200
  Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" "Chris M. Thomasson" <chris.m.thomasson.1@gmail.com> - 2021-08-03 13:10 -0700
    Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> - 2021-08-03 18:37 -0500
      Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Cholo Lennon <chololennon@hotmail.com> - 2021-08-05 18:17 -0300
  Re:"Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Blue Hat <blue_hat@hackershaven.com.jm> - 2021-08-08 13:33 -0500

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