I really wish more projects would use .hpp to differentiate from C headers. It’s really annoying to have a single header extension blend across two incompatible languages.
C++ is a superset of C.
It’s actually not. Objective-C is a superset of C. C++ is not. It’s MOSTLY compatible…but it’s not a superset. See the restrict keyword, or the need for casting to and from void*, or the inability to name variables new or delete, or class, or this. I can’t count how many C projects I have which use this as a variable name that WILL NOT compile as C++…or the need for extern C to call C ABI code…in no way is it a superset
EDIT: lol, you can downvote me if you want but I think you need to lookup what a superset is
I don’t code in C++ (although I’m somewhat familiar with the syntax). My understanding is the header files should only contain prototypes / signatures, not actual implementations. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Have I misunderstood, or is that part of the joke?
I’m not fully sure what the intent of the joke is, but note that yes, it’s true that a header typically just has the prototype. However, tons of more advanced libraries are “header-only”. Everything is in a single header originally, in development, or it’s a collection of headers (that optionally gets “amalgamated” as a single header). This is sometimes done intentionally to simplify integration of the library (“just copy this files to your repo, or add it as a submodule”), but sometimes it’s entirely necessary because the code is just template code that needs to be in a header.
C++ 20 adds modules, and the situation is a bit more involved, but I’m not confident enough of elaborating on this. :) Compile times are much better, but it’s something that the build system and the compilers needs to support.
Do other languages separate definition from implementation? 🤔 Is there another way to distribute libraries with a binary component and a public component?
