The fact that c++ has changed so much in the past 10 years - it’s possible to write completely type and resource safe code in c++ now - this passed me by until a year or two ago when i attended a Bjarne talk.
Also the c++ folks have written up a core guidelines doc (this was the main topic of that Bjarne talk), and it’s really good https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/blob/master/CppC...
I also really enjoy listening to the CppCast podcast by Rob Irving and Jason Turner, it's a nice way to follow what is happening with the language: https://cppcast.com/.
I recently wondered where one could find new C++ software since there's no announce list at all.
One of the tricks with C++ is that it isn't a product created ex cathedra by a single interest group with a focused purpose and provided for you like mother's milk; it's a generalized idea that emerged from a bazaar of interests and provided by a free market for whatever purpose you chose. It has evolved to fill a niche rather than be designed to reach a particular goal (eg. 'kill C++') or even designed to reach a vague goal ('fix all the problems with C').
There is no official mailing list because there is no official 'there' there. C++ is not an organization, or a corporation, or a guy in his mom's basement. It's an idea held (mostly somewhat) in common by a whole lot of people with otherwise no shared interests all over the world.
(Other than that, great comment!)
"It's possible" is a rather low bar. It's also "possible" in C. Is it easy though? I wouldn't say so. Not if you push lambdas over queues to be invoked in another thread, or in the same thread, but later. Not if you take references to elements of std::vector. Not if you use std::vector<bool>. Not if you use operator[] on std::vector/std::array without tweaking some macros, because C++ committee in 2021 is still not convinced that bounds-checking is a reasonable default.
It's very easy on the other hand to write perfectly idiomatic "modern C++" which is memory-unsafe. Well... Easy if you figure out which one, among a dozen, is the right way™ to initialize a variable. (And then go and read code which initializes std::vector in all those different ways and try to guess which one does what.)
The fact is that most standard library implementations can already be easily configured to bound check, so there is little pressure to mandate this in the standard.
[1] Alexander Stepanov, of STL fame, hated everything OO and called it "gook". http://www.stlport.org/resources/StepanovUSA.html
Some of those languages that nobody uses, are really good, though.
Programmers that learn them hit well above their weight-class in individual-productivity, and if they're lucky they get to support applications written in "dead" languages for fat stacks. Oh and they're often fun too -- who doesn't want to have fun for the 1/3rd of their life that we're supposed to be working?
I think I understand that some people want to be popular more than they want to be good, but what I find really weird is the people who would rather be close to popular instead of close to good. What's the point?
But of course, having fun is really important.
Such as?
No, not really. I filter for Go, Rust, Nim, and Dart on HN. Rust is the most popular with at least a post every day or two and Go about half that time or less. There used to be way more Go articles in past years. Some of the recent Go posts have gotten traction so maybe you're seeing that.
> no not really
This doesn’t make sense to me at all. 50% as popular as Rust is considerably fashionable. I imagine that Rust is one of the most common programming languages to appear in post titles on HN.
All this changed when I started learning Rust, man was I blown away by the language.. I never thought a statically typed language with manual memory management can feel so "scripting language" like.(Sure the borrow checker annoys you sometimes, nothing a `.clone()` can't fix when you are starting out). I truly enjoy writing Rust these days and never have I missed anything major from Ruby.
I'll be damned if I sit here and criticize Ken Thompson and Rob Pike, but I feel like in their quest to make Go "simple" they've perhaps held a little too hard on to their past.
tldr; Go feels a little too verbose and "dated" after learning rust.
Currently love Rust, but Crystal, Nim, and Swift are all rather distracting.
Once Go gets generics I’ll be interested in giving it a second look.