Hacker News Reader

Comment by SloopJon | Hacker News Reader

C++ has sped up the pace of its releases, but I don't have a sense of where C is. I didn't realize until I looked it up just now that there's a C18, although I gather that this is even smaller a change than C95 was.

Safe to say that a feature like this would be standardized by 2022 at the earliest?

View on HN

I just found out about C18 thanks to your comment, I was still at C11. Thanks. Anyway I think you're right, except for the fact that I don't like when language designers release versions too quickly. I don't know the situation in the C++ land, but as an example I think that Java took the wrong way.

> but as an example I think that Java took the wrong way.

I wonder what is the right way then ? Java is apparently too fast for you, and yet it gets improvements so slowly that it is getting its marketshare eaten by other JVM languages moving much faster.

If it was even slower it could as well be put directly next to the dusty COBOL and RPG boxes in the IBM attic.

This is recent, though. The releases of Java 1-7 were fairly slow and conservative.

Dusty Cobol?!?

https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/products/visual-cobol/overv...

The lastest standard revision is from 2018, and you can even do OOP if you feel so inclined.

I think that language designers should release a new version when they actually have something new and not because somebody decided that there has to be a new version every x months. Also I think that the popularity of other JVM languages, eg. Kotlin, derives not from their quick releases, but from the fact that they observed what programmers didn't like about Java and designed the language from the start keeping in mind those problems and addreesing them right from the beginning.

Since C++11, the ISO committee has been aiming for a new standard release every 3 years. So far, they've kept this cadence up. I don't recall if C++20 is actually out yet, but I know the feature set was finalized last year, if not out yet, it's probably just due to editorial issues (I've not been using C++ for work the last few years, so my knowledge might be a bit dated).

There's something to be said for the new Java approach of releasing often, with a stable LTS release every now and then, even if Oracle is muddying the waters with their licensing. The only release after 8 that interests me right now is 11. Meanwhile, the features of Java 12, 13, and 14 are available for people who do want to experiment with them.

I think we'll see this implicitly with C++. C++11 and the mostly non-controversial updates in C++14 comprise "modern" C++, whereas adoption of C++17 seems to be a bit slower.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com