A lot of people think so and the biggest reason that I have heard is that C# provides garbage collection so you no longer have to worry about memory leaks.
That’s just one of those C# aspects that I mentioned that’s preventing a lot of people from understanding how things really work.
Let’s get one thing straight; if you don’t understand memory management and think that the language will just take care of it for you, then you will not be able to program well in any language.
You can still have memory leaks in C#.
You can write your C++ programs using smart pointers that go a long way towards solving the memory management issues that so many people accuse C++ of not handling well.
There are also capabilities in C++ such as multiple inheritance that many people cite as another reason that C++ is harder than C#.
It’s true that multiple inheritance requires more thought to get right and should not be used for every occasion.
If done wrong, multiple inheritance can make a program harder to understand and may cause it to have more bugs.
But is the answer to remove multiple inheritance from the language like C# did or to learn to use the capability wisely?
The C++ language tends to give you more choices. When learning the language, if you find multiple inheritance too difficult, then don’t use it right away until you better understand it.
Once you do understand multiple inheritance, then you’ll fully appreciate what C# provides and what it removed.
The C++ language also provides a feature called templates that at first seems similar to something called generics in C#.
However, C# generics is missing half the functionality of C++ templates.
If you start out only learning C# generics, then you’re likely to never make use of the full power of C++ templates just because it’s not what you first learned and you may not even notice that there is more available. However, learning C++ templates first will better prepare you for the differences in C# generics.
Overall, I’d say that C++ is harder to learn than C# because of the extra capabilities included in C++ and because the library is not as consistent as C#.
The C++ library is getting better so this is another of those temporary feature comparisons that I mentioned that could change over time.
