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Biggest Changes In C++11 (and Why You Should Care)

Posted by timothy on from the it-serves-as-its-own-emoticon dept.

Esther Schindler writes "It's been 13 years since the first iteration of the C++ language. Danny Kalev, a former member of the C++ standards committee, explains how the programming language has been improved and how it can help you write better code."

5 of 385 comments (clear)

  1. 13 years? by undulato · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I could've sworn I was using it before then.. perhaps it was all just a bad dream?

  2. Nice but... by genjix · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Would love to use these features in the new C++, but unfortunately none of the major compilers support the new for-syntax, in class initialization, deleting members and explicit specification of base class methods.

    Also I totally don't understand why enum class no longer casts to ints... it totally makes using binary flags impossible unless I revert back to using the old style enums. But then I need to do the ugly namespace myenums { enum myenum { foo = 4, bar = 8 ... }; } hack which makes nesting inside classes impossible -_-

    1. Re:Nice but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Would love to use these features in the new C++,...

      Why? What is it about these new features that will make your job easier, your code more reliable, and easier to be maintained? Or do you just want to use those features because they're "new" - for C++ that is?

      As a long time C++ guy (Borland C++ days), I look at some of these features and think "so what?" (Lambda functions, please.) I'll probably never use them. IMHO the last truly useful feature that C++ added was Templates which lead to the STL and made my life much easier - after I got the hang of the way the STL implemented things such as "iterators" and the gotchas associated with them.

      Event hen, it drove me nuts when I had to maintain code by a C++ coder who just wanted to use features for the sake of using them - like all the classes that used one dtaa type and would always use one data type being a Template class - arrrrrghh! (All that code and overhead for nothing!) Coder: "It was a cool thing to do!"

      I tell ya, with all these features being added, I just want to say "Fuck it! Gimme an assembler, a cave, a generator, and a computer!" and grow my hair and fingernails out and laugh manically at random times.

    2. Re:Nice but... by JohnnyBGod · · Score: 3, Interesting

      What so wrong with "const int SOME_BINARY_FLAG = 0xff00ff"?

  3. Re:Still playing catch-up to C#. by rennerik · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Your comment caught some flack, but I couldn't help but make a similar observation as I read the spec. It seems that they are adding a lot of stuff to C++ that exists in C# (lambda expressions, delegated constructors, automatic deduction, initialization syntax, a dedicated null keyword, etc).

    Of course, they added a bunch of stuff that's also NOT in C# (since it's not necessary in a high-level language like C#), but I am glad that they are revamping C++ to incorporate some higher-level functions. Now we just have to wait for compilers to start adopting the new spec...