Hacker News Reader

Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

Finally! I have been suffering under SWIG and have been hoping for some time that someone would get the compiler to do this.+

Not to say SWIG isn't an amazing effort, but it's a whole C++ compiler maintained by a very small team.

+ I already put my time in at the gcc salt mines so no, I didn't try doing this myself.

View on HN

Perhaps the best thing about CLIF is that it never, ever, parses any C++ by hand [0]. It always uses a state-of-the-art, fully-industrial-strength, well-supported compiler: Clang. And it can be updated in lockstep with Clang near trivially.

[0] Actually, there is one tiny exception: CLIF occasionally separates a C++ qualified name on the scope-resolution operator "::".

I'm cautiously excited. The problem with C++ is there's just so many good frameworks but you can't use them without creating more C++.

SWIG should be called WIG. And anyway, I can't see it surviving modern C++.

As long as I'm ranting, what is modern C++ but a bunch of new languages that are incompatible with C++, each other, and everything else? Forgive me if I'm wrong but this seems like a terrible idea.

> SWIG should be called WIG. Depends on your perspective. The other alternative is (was?) to start typing up those wrapper functions manually.

Modern C++ means picking up the ideas from Alexandrescu, avoiding unsafe C style programming unless profiler tells otherwise and using the higher level features from C++ for writing nice, usable, safe libraries.

Many of the idioms actually already possible back in the C++ARM days, before C++98 was a thing, but spoiled by C refugees.

Maybe I got my terminology wrong. I'm talking about the wave of new standards. I feel like they're a bunch of new languages which are improvements over C++ but not backwards compatible with C++. Every problem you have interoperating two different languages you have between these different C++es but worse because there aren't tools like SWIG to help you.

You can say the same about any programming language that enjoys wide market adoption, except maybe for C that still thinks computers are like PDP-11's, with C99 and C11 being very tiny evolutions with little regard to improve the overall productivity.

Even Fortran and Cobol(!) have evolved more than C.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com