Interview Update With Bjarne Stroustrup On C++0x

An anonymous reader writes "DevX interviewed Bjarne Stroustrup about C++0x, the new C++ standard that is due in 2009. Bjarne Stroustrup has classified the new features into three categories: Concurrency, Libraries and Language. The changes introduced in Concurrency makes C++ more standardized and easy to use on multi-core processors. It is good to see that some of the commonly used libraries are becoming standard (eg: unordered_maps and regex)."

Comments

Re:I just don't get it....

[Free the Cowards]

Well, here's what I personally dislike about C++. You don't have to agree with them, but this is how I feel and I think it's how many other people do as well. Certainly when talking to people who prefer other languages over C++, they have expressed similar sentiments.

1. Lack of libraries. The C++ standard library basically gives you file IO, containers, and that's it. If I want to do something like fetch the contents of an HTTP URL, parse XML, serialize objects, compute dates and times, use regular expressions, compress data, or even just simple, basic Unicode support, then I have to hit some external library that I may have to install and probably can't rely on existing on another machine.
2. Flexibility. In C++ it is essentially impossible to make, say, a dictionary where each key can refer to an object of a completely different type. This is what you refer to as "sloppy", but I actually find this flexibility to be essential in designing good software. The fact that C++ does not allow it forces me to either twist my program's design in unnatural ways to fit the language, or do a lot of extra work to twist C++ to fit my program's design.
3. Manual memory management. In any complex program, balancing your news with deletes is not as simple as you make it out to be. Object ownership is a tough problem. Lots of C++ code solves this problem by making a lot of defensive copies, which in turn hurts performance greatly.
4. Errors. Make one simple typo in a template instantiation and you can generate literally pages of twisted, non-obvious errors. This makes it much harder to get a C++ program to compile than it should be.
5. Nonportability. C++ compilers tend to differ massively in just how well they adhere to the C++ specification. Creating portable C++ code is much harder than it ought to be, especially when you take into account the necessary dependence on external libraries I mentioned above. And then you need a build system to go with all of that, which brings its own set of headaches.
6. Readability and writability. With all the type information being declared all over the place, big template declarations, and the like, I find that C++ takes considerably more effort to both read and write.

The really big issues for me are the flexibility and the lack of libraries. The rest is less important. But with C++ it's like building a house out of 2x4s that you're not allowed to cut to length, whereas with moer modern languages it's more like building a house out of prefabricated rooms, with a ready supply of 2x4s and tools to shape them as you need if the prefabbed rooms don't fit your needs.

Please note that this is just my opinion, and you asked for it. Feel free to disagree, but please don't flame.

auto rocks

[ultrabot]

The new "auto" declarations really fix one of the biggest gripes with C++. Everybody is dead tired of doing

std::map::iterator it = m.begin()

Now you can just do:

auto ip = m.begin()

It takes much of the pain away from static typing...

Re:Some counterpoints.

[Free the Cowards]

Counter-counterpoints:

1. Boost is an external library, and from my very limited experience none too easy to incorporate.
2. Likewise, an external library. But putting that aside for a moment, what's the C++ equivalent to this python code?
   d = {"name":"Bob", "age":42}
   print "Name is %s and age is %d" % (d["name"], d["age"])
   Keep in mind that this is a complete python program, no further code is required.
3. While those are handy, they don't substitute for a real garbage collector.
4. I hope you're right, but I'm skeptical. Massive template instantiation errors seem to be a compiler problem, not a spec problem.
5. Key words being "can be". It's tough to do, especially since the compilers out there almost never comply perfectly with the spec.
6. Of course it's a matter of taste, I never said otherwise.

Re:It hurts you to learn C++ is still being used.

[Yokaze]

> I'm just positively amazed that Slashdot, in theory home of programmer geeks anywhere, should have such a violent dislike of C++.

Because C++ is not a pure language. It is a multi-paradigm language (imperative, OO and functional) with both a high and low-level language features and people seem to hate the aspect they which they don't prefer.

The close-to-the-metal types hate the high-level aspects and rather use C. Disregarding the fact, that changing the code from C to C++ is purely syntactical and runs without any detriment in performance. Exactly the prime idea behind C++.

The high-level people dislike C++ exactly for this approach. They don't like that the basics are so clearly visible, and are even the default. You have to hop through some loops, before you get to a higher abstraction layer. E.g. you have to use external libraries and/or special classes for memory management.

Personally, I like C++ for exactly that reason. I can start on a fairly abstract layer with pure virtual interfaces, smart pointer, signal slots and there is not a single (raw) pointer or a manual deallocation to see (or other manual resource deallocation).
Granted, it is more verbose than in a pure high level language, but that is what the machine has to do.

And if there is a performance bottleneck, I can seamless go down in the abstraction level from simple inline functions, over imperative functions with pointer arithmetic, down to inline assembler and can even guarantee a certain timing, if necessary.