Not quite a year ago, I received a .Net Rocks! mug from Richard Campbell and Carl Franklin after a comment I’d left for a previous episode was read on the show. History repeated itself on Thursday when they used another of my comments, this time one about C++, as the lead-in for the show’s main topic.

Thursday’s show was about a scripting language, chaiscript, that allows you to write scripts in C++ and use them from other C++ projects. (C++ as a scripting language is a neat trick since it’s normally compiled ahead of time and shipped to the user as a binary executable.) It’s an interesting show and you should absolutely give it a listen. There’s also an interesting bit around the 20 mark, talking about the Commodore 64 (I had no idea those disk drives had CPUs).

The gist of my comment was that some of the features added to C++ since I’d last used it sounded rather compelling (particularly “stack semantics” which sound like there’s a sharply reduced need for new and delete, and that even pointers are largely hidden). I still have reservations though because of “scars from working with a half-dozen different, not-quite compatible string types.”

The first web application I ever worked on was a bit of a brownfield product, sharing code for the business logic with a desktop product that used the Microsoft Foundation Classes library (MFC). The resulting web application started off with char * along with the MFC CString class. (That’s two string types right there.)

Because this application ran on Active Server Pages (so-called “Classic ASP”), we soon added the BSTR and CComBSTR types in order to work with COM. And then, every so often, a new “sheriff” would attempt to unify things under a single “standard” class, which meant the introduction of TCHAR, wchar_t *, std::string and std::wstring. (Of course, as we all know, unifying under a new standard just makes things worse.)

So that’s really eight not-quite-compatible string types.

It was definitely a learning experience (if for no other reason than the anti-patterns), but I very much enjoy the fact that the C#, Java, and JavaScript languages only have one string type apiece.