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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!"
Because this is obviously the language's fault.
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Or a crowbar for anybody who thinks languages make things automatically safe.
If you are a good programmer, you can do safe programs in C++ or any other language.
If you are a bad programmer, you can't do that in C++ or any other language.
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Why the #$%! do computer scientists believe that languages are like movies and you need to release a sequel? There is nothing they can add to any language that cannot be done effectively with C and C++ with a good support library like BOOST and STL. Language-specidic Threads? Enum classes? Hash tables? All of those are ALREADY possible without another language being introduced.
The purpose of new languages? To sell books. To sell compilers. To keep academics publishing about their new inventions. But lets face it, we have enough languages now. If you can't accomplish what you want to do in a relatively short time with the options that are now available, the problem isn't the language.
Yeah, but it is reasonable. Concepts are a complex feature, and C++ is an (overly) complex language. Do you really want to hold back all the other very important features like lambda, rvalue references, variadic templates, type deduction etc. just because of concepts?
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With that definition of good programmer, are there in fact any good programmers?
"Give me six lines of C++ code written by the most competent programmer, and I will find enough in there to hang him."
If you are a good programmer, you can do safe programs in C++ or any other language.
So it must just be that there are no good programmers. Because I haven't seen any safe web browsers, word processors, or PDF readers.
# (/.);;
- : float -> float -> float =
No new C++ features like threads, proper enum classes, or hash tables
Cause one thing C++ sure doesn't have is enough features, right?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
"Can" does not imply "must".
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Or better yet- take the crowbar and whack programmers who can't write in C++ until they leave the industry. If you can't understand memory allocation and pointers, you aren't competent to be in this profession.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
The Language Formerly Known as C++
This. Can we add a special addendum specifying the use of chainsaw instead of a crowbar for fixed-size buffers without checking for overflow?
C++ has reached staggering complexity already; I don't think adding another 40 pages of complicated features is going to make the language any better.
I've been following C++0x for a long time now, and have been looking forward to it, but now I'm not so sure I'll ever use it. I was looking forward to Concepts more than anything and with that gone, it seems like a extremely minor upgrade. Also, even when the spec does come out, how many years before we can trust that most compilers can use it effectively... two, three? Then after we've been using it for a while, how long before books come out that tell us that we've been using it all wrong and we have to start over (ie: the Exceptional " " and Effective " " books from Sutter and Meyers)?
Okay, so I can use C++0x well in 10 years, okay I'll probably be so burned out by then I'll be a manager, or I will have convinced someone to let us use D for embedded work and something managed for everything else.
"We need a fourth law of Robotics: Stop Fingering My Wife"
Or better yet- take the crowbar and whack programmers who can't write in C++ until they leave the industry.
Because C++ is the pinnacle of programming knowledge? *giggle*
If you can't understand memory allocation and pointers, you aren't competent to be in this profession.
Just because one can understand memory allocations and pointers doesn't mean one wants to have to deal with them manually in all their programs. There is a reason why there are auto_ptrs in C++ and it's not because those people are "noobs", it's because people want to actually spend their time writing the program rather than having their time eaten up by writing tons of boilerplate memory management code.
C++ can't be fixed by adding features.
C++ can only be fixed by removing features.
My minivan won't get me to Jamaica, so I need to add wings or pontoons? Or maybe I should buy an airline ticket instead?
Use the right tool for the job. Sticking another bag on the side of a language that's almost entirely bags isn't going to fix it. If you need a better language than C++, maybe you shouldn't be using C++.
Stroustrup alludes to it in his article, but I think that the point needs to be emphasized. Concepts need to primarily be about making the experience of using and creating templates easier. It needs to be about fixing the sort of error you mentioned.
The problem with the current proposal is that it tried to be too many things to too many people. Concept supporters need to regroup and come up with a streamlined concepts proposal that concentrates on making the language easier and simpler.
Some years ago, the C++ committee went off into template la-la land. Most of the work there focuses on template features that will be used by few, and used correctly by fewer.
Templates are useful, but "generic programming", doing arbitrary computation at compile time with templates, was a terrible idea. Templates can be abused as a recursive term-rewriting system, and through some clever and obscure tricks, recursive computations can be run at compile time. As a programming language, this trick is awful; awful from a syntax point of view, awful from an understandability point of view, and awful from a debugging point of view. If you need to do work at compile time, there have been much better approaches. LISP "macros" were standard LISP, not a second language. And even they created such a mess that Scheme had to be invented to clean out the language.
Orignally, templates were conceived as a saner way to do what C programmers did with macros, providing a way to have some type independence at compile time. But the template crowd got out of control.
The obsession with templates has led to a neglect of things C++ really needed, like better memory safety (C++ still has buffer overflows, and most of the security holes today stem from this), and better approaches to concurrency (the compiler has no idea what locks what, and it needs to know). Anything that wasn't template-related tended to be ignored by the committee.
The result of this failure has been C++ spinoffs - Java, C#, etc. Even Objective C has made a comeback in the Apple world. C++ has never even been able to displace C, twenty years on.
I've written a lot of C++, and I'm disgusted with this mess.
The problem is the amount of C programmers/thinkers who think they're writing C++ just because they type "class". It doesn't work that way, C++ is a totally different language.
eg. If you're Doing It Right then it's impossible to get a "buffer overflow" in C++. Most of the exploits you see are down to buffer overflows so I leave you to draw your own conclusions about the programmers.
Problems with C++ that will catch C programmers:
No sig today...
but C# and Java are very prominent in enterprise development, and are making huge gains.
When discussing languages with coworkers, I've frequently opined that C# is the best thing to have happened to Java in many years. Java had stagnated for a long time without any competitive threat to its domain, which eventually caused me to stop developing in it entirely and focus on C++/Qt.
A couple years ago, I looked into it again out of curiosity, and saw how far it had come since the introduction of a credible competitor (C#). Swing (it's GUI system, for those who aren't familiar with it) had gotten fast, printing turned from a lame dog into a sports car, and the core language had gained features it lacked until they appeared in C#.
As much as I despise Microsoft, the competition has been fantastic for Java.
Absolutely. C++ is a very complex language, and concepts were a feature that was going to be critical in reducing that complexity.
Any topic that involves geeks and C++ is just asking for flame wars, I'll submit my name to the mix.
Although I've been coding in c++ for more years than half of you have been alive, and am rather biased, I feel good programmers write good code independent of the language they use.
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
No, concepts weren't for the developers of big template libraries, it was for the users. There are large portions of boost which are powerful and useless to your average programmer, because simple mistakes lead to impenetrable error messages.
How many Java browsers are out there? None? Case in point.
... and both will be out after Python 4000...
And how do you think those other languages were written?
I'd still lurrrrve to see properties in Java.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
And btw before someone mentions something like Azureus as a counterexample, I've seen Firefox still eat up more RAM than that program if they are running for the same period of time and that's with about 10 or so torrents running in it.
And just as pointlessly, I've seen Photoshop eat up far more memory than my Java "Hello World" program. Seriously, pitting a modern web browser to a BitTorrent client to compare the languages used to code them is beyond absurd.
As someone else noted below, compare Azureus's memory footprint (as well as speed and responsiveness) to uTorrent, which has virtually identical functionality to Azureus but is written in C++.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
"Could that be because Bjarne first named it "C with classes"?"
It's because writing good C++ requires a lot of patience and self-discipline, something that most "programmers" simply don't have (or they're always up against a deadline or some other excuse for "just get it working, we can tidy it up later",- which never happens and you go into a downward spiral).
No sig today...
eg. If you're Doing It Right then it's impossible to get a "buffer overflow" in C++.
Is it? STL iterators (and therefore containers) do not guarantee (and usually don't provide) any bound checking, so they aren't really any safer than good old memcpy in that respect.
I read the FAQ and I can't shake the feeling that C++0x is a joke that someone's taken way too far.
It's kind of like how I believe pop icons like Britney Spears are famous because of music industry execs betting they can make anybody famous and then trying to one-up each other when it works.
Anyway, my favorite part:
"Try to imagine what the superset of C99, C#, Java, Haskell, Lisp, Python, and Ada would look like."
I imagine it would look very similar to Common Lisp.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
Code is complex, sure, but where does the RAM usage come from? At the end of the day the data being processed is a few kb of text and some bitmaps.
No sig today...
Complete rubbish. Compiler writers aren't stupid, they know how to optimize std::vector. Go and disassemble some std::vector code before posting stuff like this.
No sig today...
Yes, if you need to grow your business and all you can hire are dumb@$$3$ then yes, stick with Java (or C#).
Wow, so all the programmers you hire are perfect little automata that never make mistakes? Impressive! Where did you find such miracles of science?
And how much of a hit in performance are you taking when garbage collector turns on? How many times a minute does it fire and what happens to all those threads that are blocking?
Depends on the GC. There's a reason Sun provides a bunch of alternative implementations which have various performance characteristics that are better for different workloads.
On the flipside, how often do you see a crash because of a bad pointer reference, or worse, a security hole available to the world because of a buffer overflow in the code your perfectly little automata hacked up?
There was a time when people expected computers to be fast.
They also expect them to be stable and secure. Hint: speed isn't the sole requirement for most applications, and in fact isn't even the top one most of the time.
The advantages of C and C++ have always been the speed of execution, and it's ability to get really close to the hardware. The problem now is that the speed of execution advantage is fading. Interpreted byte code languages like Java and C# are getting faster and faster, and they byte code has always made them more portable. Add to that that the extra complexity of C++ is often unnecessary, and you start reaching a point where more and more applications which would once have been written in C++ are now being written in C# or Java, this trend is only likely to continue with more and more applications moving onto the web, and continued improvements in the byte code languages themselves.
There is certainly still a need for C and C++, they are really the only viable languages for writing device drivers and certain core OS components, not to mention all the interpreters necessary for running all these byte code languages. The problem, as I see it, and I'm by no means an expert, is that C++ is continually trying to compete with languages like Java, which it will never be able to functionally do without giving up all of the things which make it powerful and which java can't do. Java is powerful because you don't have to worry about all the things you don't really care about, and C++ is powerful because when you do need to care about them you have the level of control you need(C# tried to allow both, but it doesn't really work that way). The more libraries and features you add to C++ to make it like java, the more complex and bloated you make it, and you're still chasing an unachievable goal because you can't make C++ into Java and you wouldn't really want to.
I'm not sure why the language is going in this direction, but it seems to me better to use C and C++ where they're appropriate and use Java/C# where they're appropriate and to stop trying to create some jack of all trades language which can't exist.
Most of C++'s superior performance comes back once you start using metaprogramming. Note, modern C++ does not outperform Java because of low-level bit fiddling, it outperforms Java because of its ability to do work at compile-time. Once one starts to do this, it becomes apparent just how many class hierarchies actually never require run-time polymorphism (and only polymorphism at compile-time). As a result, the actual class hierarchies are dramatically reduced, because most classes in Java are just poor man's concepts (as in C++ concepts) or poor man's Haskell typeclasses.
Also, C++ is multi-paradigmatic, and does not try to shoehorn everything into the OOP paradigm, which means the code can fit the problem better. For instance, I lost count of how often I use boost.lambda, or boost.phoenix, or bind, which all are sort of implementations of lambda.
Then there are expression templates, which allows you to do things like matrix multiplications which even outperform Fortran.
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Gotta have functions because expecting all programmers to know how to copy and paste large chunks of code when they use them isn't unfair to those who haven't gained those skills yet.
When I'm programming, certain things set off red flags. If I see myself doing something similar many times, I extract that stuff into a function if "the thing" is parameterised by values. If it's parameterised in terms of types, I use a template, if there's obvious structure, I use a class. If it's small and gets done a lot, I use a loop. These structures are things that are not technically necessary for programming, but each mechanism cuts down on redundancy and reduces the chance of errors by having to remember where all the changes are. In addition, reducing the boilerplate makes it easier to see the structure in the program.
The auto variable is an example of type inference, and the fact that C/C++ doesn't have it is really a nuisance once one has gotten used to languages with more powerful type systems like Haskell.
Languages aren't inherently fast -- implementations are efficient
Yes, but you will dump core with a bad_index or an assertion if you write outside iterator bounds instead of overwriting arbitrary memory, opening up opportunities for exploits.
Except that you won't. Alright, checked iterators are an option, which is normally disabled by default in release builds in all implementations that I know of. So normally your std::vector iterators are just thin wrappers over pointers with no checking. And, of course, an implementation that checks iterators can check pointers just as well.
In Java, C# or about any other language I've ever programmed indexing outside the bounds arrays or other containers will b0rk your program, it's all about _how_ it borks, and in that regard C++ code that only uses STL (properly) is pretty safe against buffer under/overflow exploits.
To reiterate: there's absolutely no guarantee of that. Dereferencing an invalid iterator is U.B.; moving iterator before first element, or more than one past the last element in container, is U.B.; std::vector::operator[] with out-of-bounds index is U.B. The only thing that Standard guarantees is that std::vector::at() will throw if index is out of bounds, and almost no-one uses that (I've yet to see it in production code). It is absolutely not like Java or C#, where you're guaranteed that any out of bounds index, or any invalid iterator/enumerator, will throw upon use and not corrupt anything.
Since C++ is a super set of C by definition, your suggestion that it is a totally different language is clearly wrong.
As for, 'If you're Doing It Right then it's impossible to get a "buffer overflow"'. That's like saying if you don't make a mistake there won't be any mistakes.
I suggest you take time out to reflect.