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In my case, about 5% of our code needs the power of C++. Mixing C++ with any other language is a huge pain. Even if we were using C, mixing C with anything else is a pain, and that's despite being the most supported FFI.

Note that we started our project before Rust was an option. These days I would certainly look at rust to see if that would cover our 5% of the needs but now we have a lot of C++ and mixing rust with C++ is a pain.

by palata1 hours ago|

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I agree that mixing languages adds complexity. And I say that as someone who routinely does it, because many times it's better to reuse a mature/audited component than rewrite it from scratch.

by einpoklum1 hours ago|

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> Mixing C++ with any other language is a huge pain.

It is less pain than for most other languages, except for C. The pain is in exposing a C API for your C++ code. Then you build a library and you're set - because basically every language has the ability to call C code. Python, Rust, Java, etc. etc.

by palata1 hours ago|

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Well once you have a C API, it is relatively easy to call it from any other language.

The painful part is to have to go through a C API (modern languages can express much richer APIs and of course there are different constraints on the different runtimes, e.g. GC).

The annoying part is that each language adds overhead (its runtime). I wouldn't call it painful (I don't have much to do about it), I say "annoying" just because I would rather minimise the amount of code I ship.

by palata1 hours ago|

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Sometimes it's about the libraries. E.g. writing Computer Vision is nicer in C++ right now (IMHO) because most CV libraries are in C++.

Similarly I like to do video stuff in C just because I call gstreamer/ffmpeg directly in C, rather than having to bridge everything.