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Interview With Herb Sutter
Anonymous Coward writes "Herb Sutter, a C++ luminary, recently joined Microsoft's Developer Platform and Evangelism Division, where he acts as a liaison between Microsoft and the C++ developer community. In this interview he speaks about his new job, the role of C++ in the .NET framework, and the current state of C++."
Please check the GotW site (here).
Here you can really check if you are a C++ expert. For instance, from the first Excexptional C++ book (here) you can find one of the deepest thinking about "exception safety".
Beleive me, I know tons of experienced C++ coders who don't know that a method who simply makes if-then-else and cout something on then and else branches can end in more than 20 different execution paths! (the topic is quite big, check the book... trust me, it's worth!)
667 The Neighbour of the Beast
Herb is the creator and sole mind behind the "Guru of the Week" series, not just one of a panel.
He's also a moderator of comp.lang.c++.moderated, and recently has also joined the comp.std.c++ moderation panel, on which I also sit.
His "Exceptional C++" and "More Exceptional C++" books are more than just printed copies of the GotW material, which is freely available online.
Exceptional C++ in particular is a fine book, and all truly serious C++ programmers should read it.
Sure, I'll take a crack at constructive criticism.
Most of those in the C++ standards group are employed by companies with an interest in how the standard works out. By the time it comes to voting on issues for inclusion in the standard, however, each country gets just one vote, so no company can impose its will; standardisation works by building concensus.
So, sure, Microsoft will be pushing for things which suit them. And likewise for Sun, Oracle, Comeau Computing, and any number of other companies. The ISO standards process isn't so easy to buy.
You're just plain wrong. Even assuming that you mean the people making compilers, not the people using C++. First of all, if you exclude the people who implement your standard from the decision process, if it turns out to be a nightmare to implement or whatever, then they all just ignore the standard. Secondly, they may have some insights onto what constitutes well-definedness for various standards issues (when you're looking at the problem from the other end, you see different things). Thirdly, the people making the compilers get a lot of feature requests from their users. They can provide a lot of useful information to the consortium. Fourth, any embrace and extend can be avoided by putting the useful features that Microsoft wishes to add to lure people to their compiler into the actual standard. If the standard does what people want, there'll be no reason to use nonstandard extensions. Also note that it's not Microsoft that added a whole nother pair of operators to C++, but GCC. (try fixing _THAT_ with a preprocessor macro)
I agree with the basic sentiment that any standards body should not be dominated by a single entity, be it Netscape, Microsoft, or Sun. Microsoft should have a say. So should the GCC team. So should Borland. If they can all agree on a standard that they each want to implement, the standard will be implemented faster and with stronger adherence.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
I was at the ACCU Conference that Herb mentions in his speech, and at the end of the first day there was a special last-minute session scheduled with Herb and Stan, called "Revelation on the road to redmond". It was quite interesting, and when Herb introduced the man who had implemented partial specialisation in Visual C++, there was a tremendous round of applause! And this was not a conference full of Microsoft flunkies, far from it.
The upshot is, MS have an internal build of MSVC that will compile Loki. It should be available around the end of this year.
It's the library that comes with this book
t ml
http://cseng.aw.com/book/0,3828,0201704315,00.h
It uses enough of the corners of the language that most compilers have problems compiling it.
The book itself is very very good: all experienced C++ developers ought to read it.
Read the interview. He's talking about coding guidelines which prohibit using directives and/or declarations everywhere: e.g. a using std; placed inside a cpp file or even better inside a function definition, where it can't possibly contaminate other compilation units.
:-)
OTOH, anyone putting a using directive (especially at global scope) in a header file deserves to be shot, of course.
Herb deprecating the use of namespaces might make a good Twilight Zone++ episode...
Since the compiler status page on www.boost.org dated 7 Feb 2002, testing Comeau C++ 4.2.45 beta 2 with libcomo beta 14 claims that it fails several tests. Not having the compiler myself I do not know whether or not this is significant. I know my day-to-day compiler fares much much worse.
However, Greg Comeau thinks that the forthcoming version 4.3.0 plus dinkumware libs will be compliant, which is a very good thing. Well, it is the oldest extant c++ compiler after all (15 years old?). I've only been writing C++ commercially for 12 years, so it predates my knowledge.