Waiting for C++

I was there at the beginning, when C++ was the shiny new thing. It was bigger than C, and more complex, and it required a bit more learning, and it required a new way of thinking. Despite the bigness and the expense and the re-learning time, it was attractive. It was more than the shiny new thing -- it was the cool new thing.

Even when Microsoft introduced Visual Basic, C++ (and later, Visual C++) was the cool thing. It may not have been new, but it was cooler than Visual Basic.

The one weakness in Visual C++ (and in Visual Basic) was the tools for testing, especially tools for testing GUI programs. The testing programs were always add-ons to the basic product. Not just in the marketing or licensing sense, but in terms of technology. GUI testing was always clunky and fragile, using the minimal hooks into the application under test. It was hard to attach test programs to the real programs (the programs under test), and changes to the dialogs would break the tests.

When Java came along, the testing tools were better. They could take advantage of things that were not available in C++ programs. Consequently, the testing tools for Java were better than the testing tools for C++. (Better by a lot.)

The C#/.NET environment offered the same reflection and introspection of classes, and testing tools were better than tools for C++.

I kept waiting for corresponding tools on the C++ side.

This week it hit me: the new tools for C++ will never arrive. The new languages, with their virtual machines and support for reflection, allow for the nifty GUI testing tools, and C++ doesn't. And it never will. It just won't happen. The bright minds in our industry are focussed on C# and Java (or Python or Ruby) and the payoff for C++ does not justify the investment. There is insufficient support in the C++ language and standard libraries for comprehensive testing, and the effort for creating new libraries that do support GUI tests is great.

GUI testing for C++ application is as good as it will ever get. The bright young things are working on other platforms.

Which means that C++ is no longer the cool new thing.