The Biggest Changes in C++11 (and Why You Should Care)

There's rumour about C++14/C++17 supporting reflection:

http://root.cern.ch/drupal/content/c14

The c++ standard library is pretty sparse if you compare it to python's or java's, say. Good point about reflection; personally I don't miss it though. Where I would have used it in java, for example, I often find I can get a better result using templates - it just takes a bit more thought.

C++ already needs runtime type information [0] for certain features (dynamic_cast, typeid). So the basic compiler infrastructure is already there. No need to "rewrite from scratch". Just add more information into the RTTI data structures and provide the mechanisms to inspect (optionally modify) classes.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-time_type_information

> Too bad "Concepts" did not make it into the standard. Would help avoid the tons of unintelligible error messages one gets when using template functions incorrectly.

As far as I understood it, this was merely due to discussions what types of Concepts would be supported. There was one group of people that wanted very granular Concepts, and another group of people that wanted just very broadly defined Concepts. They never reached an agreement on this.

We didn't get concepts, but I think that in the long term it is a good thing. Instead of that we will probably get a more D like static if which basically does everything concepts did but it much easier to implement and understand.

The support is actually pretty good - since the standard went through such a long process, most compilers had support for at least some of the features as long as a couple of years ago (back around the TR1 draft).

I already use it for some little new projects. I'm sure a lot of legacy stuff won't be able to move on to the new standard for a while because they need backwards compatibility with old compilers though.