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Ask Bjarne Stroustrup, Inventor of C++
You can learn more about Bjarne Stroutrup here. Even though Bjarne isn't on your nightly news a lot (like never) he deserves (and gets) heavy respect from fellow programmers. If you have a question for Bjarne that he hasn't already answered on his FAQ page, please post it below. If you're a moderator, please moderate others' questions up or down, as deserved, which is just as important as actually asking questions. Tuesday afternoon (U.S. EST) we'll forward 10 selected questions to Bjarne. His answers are scheduled to appear Friday.
After twenty some years, its obvious that object-oriented programming is not a panacea. What are your thoughts on the future of the OO paradigm? What other paradigms do you see challenging it?
C has long been the UNIX-world's systems programming language, and still remains that way. I know you don't like to compare C++ to other languages, so I'll just ask if you feel that there are any core reasons why C++ either does not make a good systems prgramming language or failed to capture the interest of the systems C programmers.
If you could go back to when you designed C++, what would you change and why?
Well, this is weird. Just the guy I wanted to talk to this morning!
It would occasionally be handy to have typedef templates (or template typedefs?! help!), something like this:
template< class T >
typedef bool (* func)( const T &r );
. . . but that doesn't seem to be legal. I don't recall seeing anything about this issue in The Design and Evolution of C++. So what's the deal?
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
I (and maybe most of "us") know you solely through your creation of the C++ language and your assistance in authoring the ANSI standard for said language.
Aside from this one (albeit major) project, what do you work on from day to day? What projects are you currently involved in? Do you have any more language definitions/standards in the pipeline?
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
Three linked questionsquestions
1) Do you think that multiple inheritance is a requirement for a true OO Language
2) When designing a system with multiple inheritance what do you see as the pitfalls to avoid, especially when it comes to maintainability.
2) Do you know of anyway to simplifying the readability of multiple inheritance to enable first time users to do less damange.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Another item that has gained a lot of momentum in the Eiffel community is Design by Contract, for which I would love to see a standardized approach in C++, but I doubt I'll ever see it.
Lastly, Bjarne, you were quoted once as saying 'When (not if) reference counting becomes available in C++ that it would be optional' (in a book on object oriented programming languages of which I cannot find on amazon at the moment to post the ISBN). Has much progress been made on the front of making reference counted objects available? Or has your thinking changed since you were quoted?
Sanity is a sandbox. I prefer the swings.
However, all existing processors are procedural, and there is no real concept of an OO CPU.
Do you feel that OO languages, such as C++, will result in OO systems, at the hardware level, or will it always be easier to confine OO thinking to the abstract, using extremely complex compilers to translate between OO and procedural paradigms?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The biggest complaint I hear about C++ (and agree with myself, depending on whose code I'm reading), is that it gives you enough rope to hang yourself, your company, and your close family.
Unfortunately, while it's easy to give a language new features without harming backwards compatibility, it's a lot harder to take things out. Are there any features that, in hindsight, you wouldn't have put into C++ to begin with? Are there particular features (templates keep coming to mind) that you would advise inexperienced programmers to avoid?
Another question, how do you see funtional programming playing a role in the future? Do you think functional programming is an acadmeic fad or a niche market for special purposes like Ada is used for?
This is my signature. There are many signatures like it but this one is mine..
I already see a lot of questions being asked that are already on the FAQ list, so here's a handy list, with links:
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What are your thoughts on languages and the standardization process? Looking at how long it took for C (and C++) to have standards set by ANSI/ISO, and how the most popular implementations are still so very incomplete (MSVC++, even GCC in some ways), one might ask, "Why bother?" Sun might be thinking something similar with Java.
Is it worth the time and the trouble to be able to create and to point at a sort of Platonic ideal while the rest of the world is chasing a poorly realized reflection of that ideal? What are the benefits of handing over the design of a language to the standards organizations instead of pushing forward with the design yourself (see Python, or Perl, or PHP for successes of the latter)?
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how to invest, a novice's guide
How do you relate the complexity of current C++ with the much-touted simplicity of Object Oriented Programming?
Longer explanation:
Over the years, the C++ implementation has ballooned; If I recall correctly, your book the C++PL has more than doubled in size. C++ has become a very large and complicated language, and I doubt whether there are any individuals (besides you, that is) that know the entire definition by heart, let alone teams of programmers.
This means that it is not practical to use C++ fully in any project, and one also has to set strict guidelines for a project what features to use and which not. Seen, in this light, it is doubtful whether C++ has made writing software more manageable. So I think, that as tool for writing better software more efficiently, C++ is a failure.
C++'s evolution was motivated by a few mottos (you don't pay for what you don't use, C compatibility, etc.), and seen in this light, C++ is a success. Do you think that these mottos need reconsideration?
Han-Wen Nienhuys -- LilyPond
For example, the GNU C Compiler's FAQ includes an entry detailing the available workarounds. Other compilers are similar (in fact, the GCC FAQ entry makes reference to other implementations).
A number of development shops I've worked in have avoided templates precisely because of these problems, despite their benefits. Code reusability suffers as a result.
Presumably you didn't have this sorry state of affairs in mind when you were working on the specification. What did you imagine people would do? Abandon object files in favor of some other incremental-compilation scheme? (If so, what?) Are there any compilers that get this "right" in your estimation? In retrospect, would you have done anything differently to encourage compiler vendors to do the "right thing"?
.. and would ignore backwards compatibility with C, would the resulting language resemble C++? It seems to me (I mainly do Java) that a lot of language features in C++ are less then optimal and heavily biased to performance rather than usability. Templates come to mind but also such things as macros (eeeww).
I hope you won't put this question aside like you do with most question asking you to compare C++ with <fill in your language here>. While I imagine that the latter type of question must have become a boring one for you, the fact remains that C++ is now more than 20 years old and other languages might exist that address some domains at which C++ was once targeted, better. So rather than asking you to do that I would like you to describe what a modern language should be able to do compared to C++.
Jilles
You said, in "The Design and Evolution of C++" (p. 207), "Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out."
Do you still beleive this? If so, is it likely that such a language shall be created within the forseeable future?
Steven E. Ehrbar
What do you think of template meta programming? Do you consider it a boon, enabling clever programmers to do outrageously cool things like the Blitz project? Or is any benefit derived from it's use washed away by the obscure, nearly unreadable code it takes to implement it?
Davo -- Free speech, free software, AND free beer.
I was introduced to the C++ language in 1989 on the BIX online service by you and Greg Comeau whereupon the both of you set out to demonstrate (and finally convinced me) that this OO stuff wasn't just a fad and that C++ was a language that could efficiently implement it. This was during the time when Computer Language magazine had there "Language of the Month" feature article so languages had a tendency to come and go quickly back then.
As I recall, the two major goals that you stressed were a) to build a language that could get a handle on these huge projects that C was having difficulties with and b) to provide a balance of features and efficiency so that a developer should have to pay for features he doesn't use.
From my own experience using C++ in an extreme variety of projects (including very cramped embedded systems and large, multi-platform enterprise systems), there's no doubt that the great progress has been made on the first goal and that the second might have been fully achieved.
The biggest disappointment to me, however, has been the lack of ability to fully replace plain-old-C in system level development which is an area that stands to gain the most from the language's abstraction features and your stated goals of the language. I understand that early on, it would have been impossible to define standard ABI's since implementation techniques for things such as virtual method and inheritence resolution were very experimental. Now that a full decade has gone by and a surprisingly strong standard has been produced, these differences in implementations are more contrived than based on architectural considerations.
Presently the Open Source movement is growing wildly in popularity in commercial and non-commercial segments of the industry. Unfortunately, C++ cannot be used to provide linkable API's without either downgrading to severaly limiting C-based linkage or forcing everyone to use the same compiler that wants to call your library because of non-standard representations of structures and calling conventions.
Do you think that standardized application binary interfaces should be a priority time now? If so, what should be the mechanism used to define these interfaces (defacto vs. formal standards, etc), who should do it, and what can be done to encourage this development?
Beyond this issue, what are your personal priorities and hopes for the C++ language now?
Unlike Ada or Java, C++ currently has no facilities that allow a programmer or software engineer to ensure that a fault (e.g. a pointer error) in one component does not cause errors in another component (the facilities that C++ has are advisory).
The traditional answer has been to use better overall software engineering and design. But that does not work in a world in which components come from various different sources with different standards and coding conventions.
Java has many problems, but it does have a commitment to runtime safety and fault isolation. And Java's promise really works out in practice: we can combine dozens of independently developed components and trace any software faults to specific components reliably. We'd like to have the safety and decomposability of Java with the efficiency and control of C++, but given the choice, safety and decomposability usually win out for day-to-day applications for us.
So, what does the future hold for C++ runtime safety and fault isolation? Will future C++ standards mandate more facilities than exist right now? If not, how do you think C++ can survive in a world where software is composed of hundreds of independently developed components?
OpenSource programmers can write code in whatever language they want. Consequently, they write a lot of C, Perl, and Python. But with some notable exceptions, they don't write C++.
Contrast that with the lanuages programmers use at work, which are primarily C++ and Java.
It can't be entirely explained by the size of the programs written either. And as your FAQ says in the section C is better than C++ for small projects, right?, you believe that any C program can be better written in C++.
So why the disparity then?