Slashdot Mirror
Stroustrup Says New C++ Standard Delayed Until 2010 Or Later
wandazulu writes "At the end of an article written by the creator of C++, where he talks about removing a feature from the new C++ standard, he drops a bombshell: The new C++ standard (typically referred to as C++0x) has been delayed until 2010 or later. What does this mean? No new C++ features like threads, proper enum classes, or hash tables. C++0x is dead, long live C++1x!"
It's not a bombshell by a long measure. Anyone who had been tracking C++0x standardization process (reading comp.std.c++, and WG papers) knows that the goal of getting the standard out by 2010 was fairly unrealistic, mostly because of concepts. The joke that "x" in C++0x is actually a hex digit and not decimal has been around for several years now.
The headline completely misses the central part of the article and focuses on a very minor point. Everyone has known for quite a while that C++0x would actually be C++1x. There's only a few months left in 2009, so there's absolutely no surprise there. The real meat of the article is that support for "concepts", a key (and arguably the most anticipated) part of C++0x, is being dropped. That's a major disappointment to many people, including Stroustrup.
Are you saying that C++0x is unnecessary?
If so, then you haven't stumbled upon C++'s many problems. Like, lack of rvalue references. Or, lack of a proper lambda.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
Cocoa is an API, Objective-C is the language.
I haven't been following C++0x, but after reading the C++0x FAQ I am very pleased. It really fills a lot of the simple, practical holes in the language.
I think the success of C# is part of why these things are being considered. For example, C# recently added an advanced form of initializer lists - which is now in C++0x. Another example is the scoping of enums, which has long been a pain. Many coding standards require enums to be ALL_CAPS_WITH_UNDER_SCORES because they don't obey scoping rules: this is fixed. NULL is now replaced with nullptr, which is a minor improvement that looks much like how this was done in C++/CLI. (That's the bastardized C++ for .NET). Namespace cleanups, foreach, ... the list is huge, and it looks like C++ is "borrowing back" from Java and C#.
Competition is good.
I know that everything I just listed probably exists in many other languages, but C# and Java are very prominent in enterprise development, and are making huge gains. I will be very very glad to see a real ISO standard gaining ground again.
There will be integer overflow after C++0xFF
Fixed that for you.
Azureus isn't a browser though. It downloads torrents. They do completely different things. A browser actually has to render images, animations, and even videos. It has to parse large amounts of HTML, CSS, Javascript, and make sense of all that so that it can display it on the screen. Torrent applications are basically glorified FTP clients. They don't have to display anything on the screen at all. They just have to manage a bunch of internet connections and save some data to the disk. It's like me saying that Notepad uses less memory than Azureus, therefore C++ is better. Show me a browser with a similar feature set to Firefox written in Java, and then we can talk.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Gotta have the "auto" variable because expecting all programmers to know how to type efficiently or to understand what data types are being used isn't fair to those that haven't gained those skills yet.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Any garbage collected language requires more memory to operate than the program actually needs.. Otherwise you'd be garbage collecting 24/7. So yes, if you want to minimize GC cycles/pauses, your memory usage can be vastly higher than what the program would actually require in a traditional language. That's probably the big reason, for example, that the iPhone doesn't support GC in its Objective-C implementation.
C++0x adds syntactic sugar, no more.
I'm actually relieved to see concepts dropped, that was probably the biggest useless sugar ever (axioms were not just sugar, but they were the part less ready for inclusion anyway). Everything concepts can do can already be done in C++03 with SFINAE with expressions (which, thankfully, was required explicitly in C++0x unlike C++03 which is quite vague on that topic).
Lambdas are monomorphic, thus useless. Even a DSEL can do better. Worse, even MACROS can do better (since there is no stupid limit on templates being declared at file scope anymore).
Rvalue references is just broken magic; relying on NRVO works just fine to implement move semantics and is not as senseless.
The only real update that comes with C++0x is fixing the standard library so that it doesn't require stuff it doesn't need. Nothing developers haven't already solved by implementing their alternative to the standard library.
Yet, C++ remains the most awesome language ever.
Too bad the committee isn't working on actually useful additions, such as virtual templates, which would allow it to compete with dynamic typed languages such as Python.
Take a look at something like Acronis TrueImage (or any Norton program) before/after their transition from C++ to C++-with-C#-user-interface.
As someone who worked in Acronis, and wrote a bunch of code for True Image, I feel obliged to tell you that there's no C# code in it at all - it's all pure C++. Acronis SDK (which is a separate thing, and IIRC comes only with True Image Enterprise) has component that exposes .NET API, and that's written in C#, but it's separate from True Image proper, and those C# APIs are just sanitized wrappers on top of the original COM API (which is implemented in C++), and, in fact, most of C# code there is automatically generated from COM interfaces (I know that because I'm the guy who originally designed that part of it).
As for GUI in True Image (and pretty much all other Acronis products) - it's FOX Toolkit, or rather, forked and heavily-customized version of it (since it's LGPL'd, you can request the source code with customizations here).
anything which continually scans the entire heap when you're out of RAM is a showstopping problem and makes GC useless for real applications.
Luckily, GC has advanced since the 1960s.