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Stroustrup on the Future of C++
/ASCII writes "Bjarne Stroustrup, the father of C++, has written an essay [PDF] on the features of the upcoming C++0x standard. In his essay, he argues that new features should whenever possible go into the standard library and not into the language, but that the language needs to shave of a few rough corners to make it easier to use for novices."
It is interesting to see how an abstract language like a programming language evolves through time. I would think that in a language like C++ the more userfriendlyness should be in the libraries and not in the language, so I agree with the author on this point. Putting it in the libraries makes it better backwards compatible, and distributable.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Am I the only one who wonders why we need a successor to C or C++?
I've sat through the past 10 years and watched things like Java and D and Objective C come, but meanwhile most serious OS level and game development continues to be in C or C++. Doesn't this demonstrate that new language are merely a distraction to developers who haven't fully exploited the current set?
See Plus Plus Ox
...or you could just shorten it by taking out the plus plus and having C0x which is obviously pronounced cocks
"If we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate." -Zapp Brannigan
Every time a cost of entry is reduced and the expected prerequisites are thrown aside, the result is a truly less capable *person*, not a more capable tool.
Agreed - There are some things that need smoothing, but I for one am tired of dealing with people who lack a fundamental understanding of the *systems* as a whole. Examples of this are the folks coming out with CS degrees who aren't even capable of following a thought, let alone starting an actual career designing and developing software.
For them, a tool like Java offers an entry level that is acceptable given there current capabilities - A tool geared towards THAT user (and a fine one at that).
But C (and C++) can be leveraged by people who know the tool and *use* the tool for what it can do, even with it's high(er, intellectually) cost of entry.
That's 0x as in 05 as in 2005. So C++05 or C++06.
Java does not remove a few warts from C++, it forces you to use a Garbage collector, OO design, type introspection, etc, etc. Those are pretty fundamental changes.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
I program in C++ from dawn to dusk, and a few things really irk me about it:
1. Member function pointers. Implementation dependent and messy syntax that few people even know about. Their use is limited, and they don't support delegates like C#, making them ugly to work with.
2. The "virtual =0" syntax instead of something nice like "abstract" or "interface" is just weird. How can you set a prototype equal to 0? What's wrong with nice words?
3. Operator new and delete were designed by someone on crack. The only way to call a constructor is with placement new, whose syntax looks like: new (var) type(). Placement delete, however, doesn't call the destructor, which must be invoked manually. Furthermore, delete can't take parameters like new. What.
4. There is a "typeid" operator but no "typeof" operator. GCC has an extension for this, but it's not standard C++ I think.
I'm sure there are other language constructs that have annoyed me, and if you don't read my mind and fix them, Bjarne, I will kick you in the pants!
If you say "here goes my karma" I will bite you!!!
- Some cases where you can type ; where previously {} was necessary, saving as many as two keystrokes.
- The lexer ambiguity where a<b<c>> and a<b<c> > meant entirely different things is fixed, saving as many as one keystroke.
- EVEN MORE "free" constructors which may or may not work quite the way you wanted them to in practice.
- More "fancy cast" operators, which sounds nice until you remember that if there's ever a time you find yourself using the C++ "fancy cast" operators, then there is a damn good chance that it's because you're doing something unwise enough it really would be a better idea to refactor the code to make the "fancy cast" unnecessary.
...in the meantime the fundamental issues with C++ remain not only unresolved, but unaddressed. The template system is still not a generics system, but an ugly cut & paste macro system which can incidentally be used for generics, with some caveats. The class system is still fundamentally brittle and unfriendly to simple things such as upgrading a DLL or determining at runtime if two objects are of the same type. The syntax is still a forest of features whose features interact in ways so crazy and unpredictable it approaches Perl in its chaos; references are still gimped; the distinctions in behavior and use between static and dynamic objects remain awkward and newbie-unfriendly. The features that people obviously desire to have in the language as demonstrated by their tendency to hack them in with third-party libraries (like BOOST) are-- they tell us-- a good thing, and they tell us we should continue to hack them in with libraries (like BOOST). That's nice. You know, that would be a lot easier though if we had a macro system** capable of anything smarter than blind code cut and paste-- or at least a macro system** fundamentally designed to be used for anything at all other than generics.Meanwhile, it appears if I'm reading this right that the most important differences in C++0x will be changes to the standard library. Great. The STL was defined how many years ago, and it's only just in the last few years that compliant implementations have become commonplace? How many decades will it be before the "C++0x" library changes have become common in a cross-platform compatible way?
C++ is an extremely useful language, and making an update to C++ which changes as little as possible so as to follow some kind of "if it aint broken don't fix it" principle is an idea which makes a whole lot of sense. However it seems likely to me from reading this that C++0x will offer so little significant difference from C++ as to make itself simply redundant.
* ("C++0x". Were they specifically trying to come up with a name less convenient than "C#"? Ah well, I guess we can call it "COX" or "cocks" for short.)
** "Template system"
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
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