Yet another Hacker News

46 points uasi 3 hours ago 31 comments

xiaoyu2006 1 hour ago | parent

I can only describe current C++ as a Frankenstein. Trying to introduce modern features while having to keep compatibility is just really hard and probably not "the right way".

HackerThemAll 1 hour ago | parent

That's why the world looks more favorably at Rust than C++ now.

zombot 54 minutes ago | parent

Frankenstein was the scientist. It was his "monster" that was a patchwork of all kinds of things.

edflsafoiewq 28 minutes ago | parent

But "a Frankenstein" could be his work, like "a Picasso".

zombot 24 minutes ago | parent

"a" would suggest that there was more than one. True for Picasso, not for Frankenstein. Besides, only Picasso can make "a Picasso". Everything else would be fake and plagiarism.

BonusPlay 1 hour ago | parent

C++ has lost touch with reality a few years ago. Modules, a feature 6 years old still only have partial support [1] and are nowhere to be seen in practical use. Good luck finding g a C++ library using modules.

This may be similar to Java vs Kotlin race, where Kotlin added improvements, while Java was still stuck in 1.8. The answer was to add as many features to the language as possible. Looks a bit like C++ is starting to do the same.

[1] https://en.cppreference.com/cpp/compiler_support

HackerThemAll 1 hour ago | parent

> The answer was to add as many features to the language as possible.

Because Java is losing market to languages with many features. Which is good. Given history of Java under Oracle supervision, and the availability of Rust, Go and C#, I won't ever touch any JRE-based language.

quikoa 3 minutes ago | parent

Great, that means fewer bloated JVM based products will be released as well.

weinzierl 1 hour ago | parent

The simplified TLDR is that ISO for the very first time did not approve a proposed C++ standard.

9 out of 22 countries voted "no", six would have been enough. These were Denmark, Finland, Iran, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Romania, Spain, and Sweden. In a addition and independently only 12 of the 20 participating members approved when 14 were needed.

The dispute is most likely because of a single feature called "contracts".

Very simplified these are conditions placed in a function's signature that are supposed to be checked at runtime.

The proposed implementation of this feature has been controversial from the start with prominent members of the community (Bjarne Stroustrup amongst them) expressing concerns.

chiharukiryu 1 hour ago | parent

Old king is still fighting but rust is just more properly for agent powered missions

groos 1 hour ago | parent

C++ is probably the largest, most complex programming language to ever exist. I, as a former C++ compiler developer, find it hard to keep up with the language changes. What chance does an average user have?

zombot 47 minutes ago | parent

Even the author of a well-known series of books about C++ has long since "given up" because the laundry list of footguns, caveats and adversarial interactions between different features has gotten too long.

Chaosvex 8 minutes ago | parent

Assuming you're talking about Scott Meyers, that's a fabrication.

jdw64 46 minutes ago | parent

Going from C++11 to 14 and so on... it’s hard to keep up with those changes. And I’m reluctant to use C++—not because C++ is a bad language, but basically because it’s been used so widely, the places I work have a lot of legacy C++ code, and since each version is different, it’s hard to adapt. I know it’s not a feature everyone uses, and I know you have to define your domain according to your work and limit yourself to a subset, but C++ can do too many things, and even within that there are many overlapping ways, so it’s more confusing. When features are added, you do feel pressure to know them, right? In my head I know “C++ should be limited depending on the domain!” but the problem is that using this language means you have to know it—and even in the same domain, C++ has many different ways of doing the same thing, so it’s freeing but painful for maintenance, I think.

hasley 22 minutes ago | parent

This may not invalidate your point, but C++11 was a major step forward that, for me, made C++ feel much more convenient and modern than before. And C++14 is basically just adding/fixing stuff that should have been in C++11 in the first place.

jdw64 16 minutes ago | parent

I like C++11 too. (My introductory book was on C++11 as well—yes, it’s that book about modern C++11.) But some projects require C++14, and other times I have to use C++98.

I’m a “traveling programmer” in Korea. But when I go out to a work site because they say I have to work on C++, as you know, there are so many versions that it’s painful.

rfgplk 58 minutes ago | parent

The C++ committee is pointless, and this is coming from a C++ expert.

Most of the things the committee has been "working on" are realistically _side projects_ today with AI. I've made countless additions to my clang fork the most notable being a source compatible borrow checker, ie you turn it on and it tells you where you effed up. Zero source changes. Equally as correct as Rust. For any sane C++ program. The committee still isn't capable of implementing this btw.

spacechild1 39 minutes ago | parent

As a C++ you should know that the C++ committee is not responsible for implementing features.

zombot 57 minutes ago | parent

What does "DIS" mean?

Someone 52 minutes ago | parent

Draft International Standard (https://committee.iso.org/sites/tc211/home/resolutions/isotc...)

This was the vote to promote the current proposal to draft standard.

mananaysiempre 52 minutes ago | parent

“Draft International Standard”, but that doesn’t mean much unless you read how the ISO process works[1]. (It’s like writing “Advanced Encryption Standard” instead of “AES”—unhelpful beyond giving the broadest category to which the thing belongs, “a document” resp. “a cipher”.)

[1] https://www.iso.org/stages-and-resources-for-standards-devel...

weinzierl 51 minutes ago | parent

DIS is Draft International Standard, the near-final draft that ISO national bodies vote on before it becomes an official standard.

Also: LEWG is the Library Evolution Working Group.

affenape 48 minutes ago | parent

DIS NUTS

qalmakka 56 minutes ago | parent

IMHO the current contracts are a half-baked feature that I suspect will immediately end up in most coding styles as "do not use contracts".

I understand the concept but having a feature that's not consistent among compilers, targets, ... all while doing absolutely nothing to solve the _real_ problems with C++. Like that the build model is still the obsolete TU model of C, while adding multiple compile-time features that inevitably end up causing build times to skyrocket considerably. Or that modules are still DOA after 6 years. Or that the syntax is full of bullshit anti-features that could be at least fixed by having a proper build model (like Rust) and editions (like Rust).

Having yet another feature that only works sometimes with quirky semantics is dumb and I understand why many people feel like it should be shelved to prioritise the features people _really_ care about, like meta

zombot 34 minutes ago | parent

> the features people _really_ care about

And what are those? You seem to assume that "everyone" (except the committee) is in agreement about them.

I like the editions idea. We could have a memory-safe C++ successor without being weighed down by old mistakes.

Vaushite 22 minutes ago | parent

We have one. It's called Rust.

rurban 51 minutes ago | parent

This contracts design is good, opposed to Gudstedt's variant with the semicolon.

Because here it is trivial to make them backwards compatible, by just using a PRE() and POST() macro which are empty pre-C++26.

The contracts_assert is either static or runtime, which the compiler can decide. Better than explicit static/asserts, which are either unnecessary or costly.

koe123 50 minutes ago | parent

What a mess. Can anyone give me a bull-case for why you would ever pick C++ for a new project?

IshKebab 41 minutes ago | parent

You want to use Qt. Or you're writing for a platform where you have no choice (most microcontrollers for example).

From a language perspective the only one I can think of is that C++ coroutines are much more powerful than what Rust gives you at the moment, even though they are very footgun-dense (quelle surprise).

But yeah, overall there is very little reason to pick C++, especially now it's feasible to translate existing C++ to other languages.

ankurdhama 7 minutes ago | parent

> You want to use Qt

But isn't using Qt like learning a whole new layer of language on top of C++, the meta compiler, signal/slot system etc and then Qt have its own set of standard classes like QString (instead of using std::string)