alt Hacker NewsThe dialects issue is why I avoid interviewing in C++, because inevitably it turns out the interviewer has some weird view of what "C++" is and doesn't realize it. Years ago I had an interview in "C++14" that required std::optional (C++17) as implemented by a C++14 compiler with only experimental, nonstandard support. In another case, an interviewer on the LLVM team vehemently disagreed with me that you could legally implement std::atomic types with mutexes, as I was going over a story about fixing issues in an awful stdlib that implemented them with mutexes.
This kind of thing doesn't happen when I interview in other languages.
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What was the disagreement on the atomics issue?
I only know them from openMP (more of a Fortran person)… without much thought my gut says that it’d be possible to implement an atomic operation with a mutex, but sort of defeating the purpose. An atomic operation is mostly expected (intended? hoped?) to be backed by some hardware atomic instructions anyway, right?
It seems like the history of programming languages since the 1980s has mostly been people trying to avoid C++.
First languages with run-times and dynamic types, and more recently lower levels of abstraction (Go, Rust).