The Future of C++ As Seen By Its Creator

holden writes "In a rare public talk, C++ creator Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup discusses his ideal in programming languages, as well how he sees the next version (and beyond) of C++ developing. He explains the general selection criteria used for adding new features, some of the legacy of C++, and many other interesting topics. Especially interesting is during the Q&A he explains his views of the embrace and extend mentality some implementations, such as VC++, have taken."

Comments

uh...

[cosmocain]

...transcript, anyone? i hate watching or listening to vids at work.

Re:uh...

[Pseudonym]

Good afternoon everybody, I would like to start by including iostream.h into the discussion.

That ruined the joke for me. Like Stroustrup would ever include the legacy non-namespaced header!

Mod Parent Insightful

[dreamchaser]

Video or audio just for the sake of being flashy is a dumb idea and I usually won't watch or listen. If I want audio and video I'll devote my full attention to my TV feed. Otherwise when I'm accessing information on the Internet I want text. I can read it far faster than someone speaks on a video interview for one thing, and for another text lends itself far better to (human)multitasking than video or audio does.

The problem with VC++

[PhrostyMcByte]

Is that they have given 95% of the development time toward managed languages.

If you look at the new Visual Studio 2008 - in the three years since 2005 was released, what does Orcas have for C/C++? Still no C99, with open admission that there are no plans to support it. No TR1 for C++. No significant compiler changes. Intellisense is still slow and quite easily stops working all together. Still no assembly support in the 64-bit compiler, missing intrinsic functions for important instructions such as CMPXCHG16B.

What we get is a newer bundled Windows SDK (which you can download NOW), updated MFC libraries (yuck), and a few new options for Vista compatibility.

In three years, .NET has advanced from 2.0 to 3.5 with huge changes like WPF, WCF, LINQ, etc. They have all but forgotten C++.

Re:The problem with VC++

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

If you look at the new Visual Studio 2008 - in the three years since 2005 was released, what does Orcas have for C/C++?

I'll see you VC++ 2008 and raise you VC++ .Net (aka VC++ 7.0, aka the 2002 release).

The sad thing is, from a pure C++ programmer's point of view, a lot of people still regard VC++ 6 as the peak. Sure, the standards compliance is better now, and that's a real improvement. Sure, there have been a few optimisation improvements, and those are worthwhile (when they don't introduce bugs). Sure, the debugger has better visualisation support (autoexp.dat) even for native code, and that's definitely useful (if only they'd document it properly).

But when they moved to .Net for everything, the IDE slowed down horribly, even without the Intellisense/multi-threading mess that they finally fixed in 2005SP1. Certain features (I'm looking at you, browse toolbar) actually disappeared from VC++, for the rather poor reason that they couldn't be supported in all .Net languages. I understand that the whole unified architecture thing makes sense from a development perspective at Microsoft, but the bottom line is that users don't care, and removing useful functionality is bad. I also appreciate that, several versions later, we now have most of the same basic functionality back again, but it's still a mess compared to the simple, effective browse toolbar. Similar comments apply to various being-too-clever changes to Intellisense, incidentally.

Perhaps more seriously, as great as all these new optimisations are, we've found far more compiler bugs recently than we ever used to. We write serious mathematical libraries at work, and I promise you it is not fun to spend several days tracking down a bizarre floating point problem, because it turned out that the global optimiser got it wrong fifteen functions up the call stack and now the FPU stack is overflowing.

Meanwhile, we get to see Microsoft putting lots of goodies in for .Net developers. I'm sure they'd love us all to develop for .Net, but until they support it on seven different platforms (where all versions of "Windows" are grouped together as just one of those), it's never going to be of much interest to us.

Right now, Visual C++ is still (in my personal opinion) the best C++ compiler/IDE combination available today. But things move fast in software. Code compiled with g++ has lagged in performance for a long time, but if the recent work behind the scenes on things like SSA bears fruit, that performance gap could close very fast. Eclipse/CDT is so clunky as to be almost unusable for C++ development right now (don't flame me, it's just a personal opinion) but I check every now and then to see how things are going and it sounds like someone might be planning a big clean-up so it doesn't feel like C++ forced into a Java-friendly IDE any more. With Microsoft pushing all their funky new UI support into things like WPF that almost no-one uses, and portable GUI toolkits like wxWidgets and Qt becoming better all the time, it's not like having MFC support is a great bonus for new developments anyway.

In other words, if VC++ 2008 doesn't deliver real improvements for non-.Net-only C++ developers, it's entirely possible that the serious players will be switching to genuinely better open source alternatives for new developments well before the next version of VC++ is out. And that should scare Microsoft, because the superiority of VC++ and the ease of use of VB are the reason so many people have been making effectively Windows-only software for so long.