Boost

Is C# the Boost of C-family languages?

Posted on October 28, 2010

For all the cons of giv­ing a sin­gle en­tity con­trol over C#, one pro is that it gives the lan­guage an un­matched agility to try new things in the C fam­ily of lan­guages. LINQ—both its lan­guage in­te­gra­tion and its back­ing APIs—is an in­cred­i­bly pow­er­ful tool for query­ing and trans­form­ing data with very con­cise code. I re­ally can’t ex­press how much I’ve come to love it.

The new async sup­port an­nounced at PDC10 is ba­si­cally the holy grail of async cod­ing, let­ting you focus on what your task is and not how you’re going to im­ple­ment a com­plex async code path for it. It’s an old idea that many async coders have come up with, but, as far as I know, has never been suc­cess­fully im­ple­mented sim­ply be­cause it re­quired too much lan­guage sup­port.

The lack of peer re­view and stan­dards com­mit­tee for .​NET shows—there’s a pretty high rate of turnover as Mi­crosoft tries to iron down the right way to tackle prob­lems, and it re­sults in a very large li­brary with lots of re­dun­dant func­tion­al­ity. As much as this might hurt .​NET, I’m start­ing to view C# as a sort of Boost for the C lan­guage fam­ily. Some great ideas are get­ting real-​world use, and if other lan­guages even­tu­ally feel the need to get some­thing sim­i­lar, they will have a bounty of ex­pe­ri­ence to pull from.

C++, at least, is a ter­ri­fy­ingly com­plex lan­guage. Get­ting new fea­tures into it is an up­hill bat­tle, even when they ad­dress a prob­lem that every­one is frus­trated with. Get­ting com­plex new fea­tures like these into it would be a very long process, with a lot of ar­gu­ing and years of delay. Any extra in­cu­ba­tion time we can give them is a plus.