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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."
...transcript, anyone? i hate watching or listening to vids at work.
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 future of BASIC has been envisioned as a language to do more and more intricate beeping loops in high school classes.
Great - I've been hearing a lot about C-Pound.
Meta will eat itself
Please use the torrents, and keep those torrent up and running after you're done d/l'ing.
o rrent Ogg/Theora (Recommended)o rrent XviDo rrent MP4o rrent MPEG
http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/files/stroustrup.ogg.t
http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/files/stroustrup.avi.t
http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/files/stroustrup.mp4.t
http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/files/stroustrup.mpg.t
AC to prevent karma whoring.
Is that they have given 95% of the development time toward managed languages.
.NET has advanced from 2.0 to 3.5 with huge changes like WPF, WCF, LINQ, etc. They have all but forgotten C++.
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,
Don't you mean WTFV?
Not that job listings are a particularly good indicator of anything, but from Monster:
The C++ ones include plenty of new systems.
"The Milliard Gargantubrain? A mere abacus - mention it not."
C99 is driven by customer demand. And I don't mean as in a bunch of geeks saying 'implement ALL of C99 now!' but as in they work with their enterprise customers to prioritize features.
TR1 WILL be supported as soon as C++0x is finalized. Not sooner. If they would implement is now, it would likely change as soon as the new standard is ratified. Of course, even if they would implement now, you would criticise them as soon as the standard is ratified because ZOMG! Microsoft's TR1 is proprietary and out of date! LOLOLOLROFLMAO!
I suspect they will simply license TR1 from dinkumware which is feature complete with the current state of TR1.
Intellisense is a dog. People are working on it, and a lot of redesign is going on. Not just for intellisense, but for the whole compiler architecture to make it more scalable and plufable.
And I don't know where you are getting your info from, but asm is perfectly supported in 64 bit. Just inline assembly isn't because for 64 bit code this would make it non-portable between different 64 bit architectures.
You can still add asm files to your VC++ project and compile them.
And you can say yuck to MFC and I would agree. But a very large number of enterprise businesses still builds massive VC++ applications that use it extensively. maintaining and improving it makes lots of business sense.
And finally, C++ is not meant to be as RAD as C# and VB because that would require a lot of manpower which cannot be justified. VC++ is targeted for interoperability, performance and control over the program execution. Not for whipping up a data driven LINQ doc. People who want to use LINQ would simply build a C# project for data interaction and add it to their mixed mode C++ project.
If you really understand C++, migrating to C# is very easy. C#->C++ however...
but, if we talk about managed languages, I'd go straight for Python or Common Lisp.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
Recently, I've just started getting into C++, and I can't understand why so many people hate the language with such a passion. The thing is, if you need/want to write your program in a compiled language with plenty of library support, then aside from C, what options are there? I'm not trying to start a flamewar, but I figure if I want to say use C (or other C++) libraries and a compiled language then I feel C++ is much better option than C. One very smart and experienced C programmer I know hates C++ with a passion complaining that "it's too complex" and just rejecting it outright.
I haven't yet written (or debugged) any large programs in C++, so that could be why I'm still enthusastic. Perhaps after some time with the language I might see what everyone is so worked up about.
I'm reading through "Effective C++" by Scott Meyers, and although the language seems like it has its warts and complexity, it also offers a great deal of power and is a hell of a lot more fun to program in than C because you get the abstraction support of objects, namespaces etc. Streams - awsome. Shared (reference counting) pointers - awsome. Less need for the preprocessor - awsome. And the standard library (plus Boost too) is so vast... containers, algorithms, it's all there.
Python is still my favourite general-purpose language, but if I need something compiled, then I don't see what is so bad about C++. Sure, Objective-C is a far better approach to the "lets-make-a-better-C" idea, but I'm not sure how to use it (and the standard library) outside of OSX or GNUStep.
Dr. Stroustrup made a great contribution by designing the C++ language. However, in recent years it seems to me that he has been taking a leisurely approach to making improvements.
... Hans-J. Boehm's site". It seems to me that there
are too many areas in which the C++ answer is "You can just go there", rather
than "This is the standard, certified method."
Stroustrup is, unlike most programmers, an excellent writer. His FAQ is an example. Quote: "What's a good certification for C++ programmers? To the best of my knowledge, there isn't a good certification program for C++ programmers. That's a pity. A good certification program would be most useful. However, C++ lacks the central organization that would produce a solid certification program, and a certification program without authority or that focused on syntax would be worse than useless."
I'm certainly not an expert in this subject. However, I get the same impression from the words "C++ lacks the central organization" in that paragraph that I get from his other recent work. Something like, "What, me be a leader?"
Note that Java and C#, which are sometimes seen as replacements for C++, are proprietary languages from companies that are routinely mismanaged. If you use those languages, you partner with those companies, and it is possible that you too will suffer from their mismanagement. For that reason, there is a big need for strong leadership in maintaining a language unencumbered by issues of proprietary behavior.
Concerning Java, Dr. Stroustrup says "Java isn't platform independent; it is a platform. Like Windows, it is a proprietary commercial platform. That is, you can write programs for Windows/Intel or Java/JVM, and in each case you are writing code for a platform owned by a single corporation and tweaked for the commercial benefit of that corporation."
Concerning C#, he says, "It will take a lot to persuade me that the world needs yet another proprietary language (YAPL). It will be especially hard to persuade me that it needs a language that is closely integrated with a specific proprietary operating system."
Again, I'm not an expert in this area, but it seems to me that Dr. Stroustrup tends to define his leadership narrowly and concern himself with programming constructs rather than larger issues such as extension, standardization, and certification of libraries, for example. About C++ garbage collection he says, partly: "See
It's amazing to me, but true leaders are very rare. After all these years, we still depend on Dr. Stroustrup, even though he has been less than a complete leader in the more social aspects of developing the C++ language, in my opinion.
After this we can get onto the main proceedings which might or might not return anything.
We move to the future by emitting a string of "Hello world" before returning zero.
This is the end of the discussion I hope it was informative. Yes, all quarter megabyte of it. A Hello World program that uses <iostream> has been seen to take nearly that much space when compiled with g++ and linked statically with GNU libstdc++, on fairly recent versions of both MinGW and devkitARM toolchains. Compare this to an equivalent program that uses only <cstdio>, at under 6 kilobytes each. (Actual source code, binaries, and makefiles are available on request.) This hurts especially on one of the platforms that devkitARM supports, which has only 262,144 bytes of program RAM and no suitable shared library mechanism. There are some people who claim to have reduced libstdc++'s <iostream> overhead by a factor of four, but they're not revealing how they did it other than a vague "RTFM".
C++ is far too complex yes. But there is nothing that can really replace it. A language which supports functional, generic, procedural, object-oriented programming, with static typing, metaprogramming, and heavily geared towards native building?
The thing is, most development projects that use C++ today don't need all of that.
C++ is a fine, pragmatic tool, and I have great admiration for Stroustrup's ability to build such a useful thing. C++ is also a powerful systems programming tool.
But C++ is not a good language for most application development, which is what a great deal of code written in it really is. I think there are several separate but somewhat related reasons for this.
One is the safety argument. Most people simply don't need the flexibility/footshootability [delete as applicable] of C++. You need only look at the much-hyped field of garbage collection to see that (a) many professional developers find this one feature useful that they regard Java as superior to C++ for this reason alone, (b) many more professional developers have no clue about the overheads involved (which are almost zero for typical applications using modern approaches to GC implementation), and most importantly (c) a great many developers using languages without GC make mistakes that developers using languages with GC wouldn't. Similar arguments apply to other routine problems, such as pointers/NULL.
The second is the expressive power argument. Life is too short to be using programming languages with primitive, error-prone control flow constructs, functions that aren't first-order entities, no syntactic support for common data structures, crude macros, header files, etc.
Third we have the standard library argument. Yes, yes, you can get a C++ library for almost anything. That's not the point. The key word is "standard". Take a look at the huge practical success of Java and Perl, and tell me the vast Java standard library and CPAN have nothing to do with them. Sure, C++'s standard library is, technically, of a higher quality than most. But it still has stupid flaws (string support and IO streams are both fundamentally broken, for example). More seriously, it has stupid gaps. In the 21st century, it's hard to seriously advocate application development in a language with no standardised support for user interfaces, networking, concurrency, file systems, etc. No, I'm not going to spend days trying to find the right non-standard library for me. Non-standard libraries are for solving significant problems, where the difficulty and scope make it worth investing the time to find and hook in someone else's code. They're not for trivia that everyone uses all the time.
And finally, we have the tools argument. Working with header files sucks, and while just about everyone else is playing with their funky, auto-refactoring, navigation supporting editors, what do we have? VC++ (where refactoring still isn't available in native C++) and Eclipse (which is C++ forced into a Java-like IDE)?
The really scary thing is that reality bites now. It's not like I'm the first person to identify these practical flaws with using C++ for application development. It's not like other people haven't developed languages and tools with all these improvements already. And yet C++ continues to be one of the most important application programming languages today. Why?
Momentum. That's why. Building a new programming language with a syntax that doesn't look like C is asking for trouble; just look at the arguments Python sees over whitespace. (Curiously, I've never seen such complaints made about Haskell. Perhaps this shows a difference between the insight of your average professional programmer vs. your average language geek academic?) More to the point, trying to advocate a new programming language for industrial application development that isn't some form of block-structured, OO-based clone is asking for trouble.
I'm hopeful that over the next few years, as hardwar
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I tried to post a comment on this story, but was unable to upload my video response.
(sigh)
C++ is my main development language right now, but I have to say: please give it a rest. C++ is what it is, and I don't think adding even more crap to it is going to make it any better.
What we need is a language with C++-like performance characteristics and a C-like syntax that will feel familiar to C/C++ programmers but without all the baggage of 30+ years of C history.
(And, no, neither Java nor C# are that language.)
a new language like D and not just an improved C++.
As a C++ programmer, I can tell you that it is nearly impossible for C++ to make coding, compiling and debugging easier without redesigning the language.
Coding: Name one C++ editor or IDE that offers accurate code completion or code refactoring (compared to other languages.) I've tried Source Insight, SlickEdit 2007, Visual Studio 2005, Understand for C++, Vim, etc. and it is clear C++ is too complex compared to most other mainstream programming languages.
Compiling: Implementing a C++ compiler is far too difficult. And compiling takes too long even when you use C++ idioms like pimpl.
Debugging: Sure, boost.org's smartpointers and RAII are helpful but how many hours do C++ programmers spend tracking down bugs that would've taken minutes (if not seconds) to track down or avoid in other programming languages?
Why do I use C++? Because it is compiled, has numerous 3rd-party libraries, and is widely used. Like Windows XP, it might be a pain but it is so widely used that you'll have no problems finding employers that will pay you to use it.
Simply put, we deserve something better than C++ and it isn't going to be enough to enhance C++ because a full redesign is needed in order to address the issues noted above. We need and deserve a language that takes what we've learned from C++ and is designed from the ground up to address those issues.
So far, D programming language seems to offer the best hope, and some really talented C++ gurus like Walter Bright and Andrei Alexandrescu are involved.
C++ has many problems. Some, like "an array is a pointer", it inherited from C. Some were mistakes in the original design that were later fixed, like unchecked downcasts, "this" as a pointer rather than a reference, and the lack of generics. And some are there because Strostrup is in denial about the problems, like the fact that the language gives no help with either thread or memory management.
Memory management remains the biggest problem. The fundamental problem is that C and C++ require the programmer to obsess on who owns what, while providing zero assistance in managing that information.There are ways out of this, involving syntax and compiler support for owning and non-owning pointers. But instead, attempts have been made to paper over the problem with templates. This never quite works, because for some things you still need a raw pointer, which breaks the abstraction. The history of auto_ptr (up to standard revision #4 now, I think) makes this clear.
Bolting on a garbage collector doesn't help much in a language with destructors; see the mess in Microsoft's "managed C++". If you're going to go with a garbage collected approach, it's better to go to a language designed for it, like Java.
Most of the standards effort is going into template features that few will use and fewer still will use well. Trying to use the template expansion engine as a general purpose macro system is a terrible idea for production code. But it has a big fan club on the standards committee. Worse, the C++ commitee does very little to improve language safety and reliability. Which is why we still have buffer overflows in C++ code, fifteen years in.
Incidentally, none of this has anything to do with C++ being compiled directly to machine code. There have been safer compilable languages usable for system-level programming. Modula 3 was probably as good as it got. But that language died when DEC went under. It's possible to hard-compile Java; there's a version of GCC for that, and it's getting some interest in the embedded community. The problem could be fixed. But it won't be, because the people responsible are in denial.