Is it Bad Practice to use C++ only for the STL containers?
- by gmatt
First a little background ...
In what follows, I use C,C++ and Java for coding (general) algorithms, not gui's and fancy program's with interfaces, but simple command line algorithms and libraries.
I started out learning about programming in Java. I got pretty good with Java and I learned to use the Java containers a lot as they tend to reduce complexity of book keeping while guaranteeing great performance. I intermittently used C++, but I was definitely not as good with it as with Java and it felt cumbersome. I did not know C++ enough to work in it without having to look up every single function and so I quickly reverted back to sticking to Java as much as possible.
I then made a sudden transition into cracking and hacking in assembly language, because I felt I was concentrated too much attention on a much too high level language and I needed more experience with how a CPU interacts with memory and whats really going on with the 1's and 0's. I have to admit this was one of the most educational and fun experiences I've had with computers to date.
For obviously reasons, I could not use assembly language to code on a daily basis, it was mostly reserved for fun diversions. After learning more about the computer through this experience I then realized that C++ is so much closer to the "level of 1's and 0's" than Java was, but I still felt it to be incredibly obtuse, like a swiss army knife with far too many gizmos to do any one task with elegance. I decided to give plain vanilla C a try, and I quickly fell in love. It was a happy medium between simplicity and enough "micromanagent" to not abstract what is really going on. However, I did miss one thing about Java: the containers. In particular, a simple container (like the stl vector) that expands dynamically in size is incredibly useful, but quite a pain to have to implement in C every time. Hence my code currently looks like almost entirely C with containers from C++ thrown in, the only feature I use from C++.
I'd like to know if its consider okay in practice to use just one feature of C++, and ignore the rest in favor of C type code?
