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C++0x Finally Becomes a Standard
Samfer writes "On Friday August 12th 2011, the results for the final ISO ballot on C++0x came in, and the ISO C++ Standards Committee were unanimous in favor of approving the new C++0x (for now unofficially known as C++11) object-oriented programming language standard which is intended to replace the existing C++ standard. The new standard is to offer new and improved features such as lambda functions, concurrent programming functionality, direct data field initialization, and an improved standard library to name but a few."
Although I haven't heavily used C++ in years, it is nice to see a decade long effort finally come to fruition. Especially nice is the support for type inference which should save quite a few people from RSI and make refactoring code a bit less obnoxious.
Wrong thread dude, think you were looking for:
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/11/07/28/1758221/Oracle-Announces-Java-SE-7
As the inaugural copy of the reference manual for the new standard was being printed and bound, it underwent gravitational collapse due to its enormous mass and became a black hole, killing all the committee members. Stroustrup was quoted as saying that despite the misfortune, he still has confidence that the C++0x standard will help programmers be more productive and efficient.
and WOOSH there goes my karma...
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Objects
I made an app! Shoutium
It's nice that they finally got the standard done. But there's so much junk in there. The C++ committee was dominated by people who wanted to do cool things with templates.
Some years ago, someone figured out that it was possible to abuse the C++ template system into doing arbitrary computations at compile time. This developed a fan club. That fan club has dominated the C++ standards committee, because nobody else cared. So now we have a standard for C++ which supports template-based programming a little better.
Current thinking seems to be that,while template programming is too hard for ordinary programmers, the templates will be written by l33t programmers and then be used by the lower classes. Unfortunately, if anything goes wrong, the end user has to look at the innards of the template to find the problem. We went through this with LISP decades ago. Check out the MIT Loop Macro, That finally became stable about the time LISP died out.
Note what isn't in the new C++. There's no more memory safety than in the old one. (Fans will say that it's safer if you only use the new features. Now try to call some library that doesn't use them.) So the buffer overflow attacks and crashes will continue.
C++ is the only language to offer hiding without memory safety. Hard-compiled languages from Pascal through Go have hiding with safety, as do all the major scripting languages. C has neither hiding nor safety; the pointer manipulations are right there in the source. There have been safe, hard-compiled languages without garbage collection, most notably Ada and the Modula family. Safety and speed are not incompatible.
Correction:
2) Operator overloading: because
Matrix A, B, C, D;
A = A+B*C + A*D;
is so much more readable than
Matrix A, B, C, D;
A.equals(A.plus(B.mult(C)).plus(A.mult(D)));
.... oh wait, it is! This is why Java sucks and C++ rocks for scientific programming.
You lazy, spoiled punks with your Java and C# garbage collection. Back in my day, we collected our OWN garbage. It was a miserable task, but we were ignorant and didn't know any better. AND WE LIKED IT!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
First DNF, then a HURD kernel, now C++0x... Remind me to send some parkas to hell.
C Plus PLox
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
But the winner is:
(+ A (* B C) (* A D))
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Encapsulation
Polymorphism
Productivity
To name a few....
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Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
- precise garbage collection (not that I'm missing it)
What is the matter with everyone wanting a garbage collector? Personally, I find smart pointers to be far superior to garbage collection and the new standard now incorporates them in the STL (strongly influenced by BOOST)! With them, the sole idea of garbage collection in C++ is somewhat useless and obsolete.
The x is a placeholder. C99 was C9x before it was standardised. The two digits specify the year (See: C89, Fortran77, and so on) in which the standard is finalised. This is the version of the standard that will be finalised some time between '00 and '09. In common with all other C++ projects, this one was completed late.
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It took about 45 minutes to write and test (and I'm not a Ruby expert by any means) and it's less than 100 lines, compared with the 1000+ line C program. I call it a win for Ruby
Challenge accepted! I bet I could rewrite that program in less than ten lines of Perl code. Any takers?
Seriously now, I've tried nearly every language I can put my hands on. I still use C when the going gets tough. One of the reasons is that C is not likely to change.
I've done a lot of small systems in Python lately and, yes, for a small system I can get it going faster than in C. HOWEVER, now comes Python 3. They tell me now that I should have used "from future import division". Apparently I'm too stupid to read the proper documentation, it was clearly stated in PEP 947, or something like that, that the behavior of the division operator would change. It seems that I should read carefully every single one of those thousands of PEPs to make sure they won't pull the rug from under my feet.
If I ever have to go through every division operation in a program to check which ones can stay as '/' and which ones have to be changed to '//' I will take the opportunity to rewrite that program in C, as, I can see it clearly now, I should have done from the start.
Early on, the C++0x spec had "opt-in" garbage collection, which was perfect! You'd declare a pointer as a garbage collected pointer if you wanted that, but otehrwise no GC. That was useful for cyclic data structures, and otherwise you could ignore it.
Sadly, missing from the final spec.
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After a month of coding Java and never having to worry every time I typed "new" I never looked back.
Modern C++ programmers don't need worry about typing "new" either; they use smart pointers to handle the "garbage collection" for them. Works great, and avoids the unpredictability, overhead, and performance problems of a garbage collection thread.
(yes, I know it's possible for reference-counting to leak if you introduce a cycle into the graph. That said, in the last ten years of C++ program, that problem has bit me exactly zero times)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.