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Comment by kajaktum | Hacker News Reader

C++ needs to give itself up and make way for other, newer, modern, language that have far, far fewer baggage. It should be working with other language to provide tools for interop and migration.

C++ will never, ever be modern and comprehensible because of 1 and 1 reason alone: backward compatibility.

It does not matter what version of C++ you are using, you are still using C with classes.

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Why should C++ stop improving? Other languages don't need C++ to die to beat it.

Half-serious reason: because with each C++ version, we seem to get less and less what we want and more and more inefficiency. In terms of language design and compiler implementation. Are we even at feature-completeness for C++20 on major compilers yet? (In an actually usable bug-free way, not an on-paper "completion".)

The compiler design is definitely becoming more complicated but the language design has become progressively more efficient and nicer to use. I’ve been using C++20 for a long time in production; it has been problem-free for years at this point. It is not strictly complete, e.g. modules still aren’t usable, but you don’t need to wait for that to use it.

Even C++23 is largely usable at this point, though there are still gaps for some features.

gcc seems to have full C++20, almost everything in 23 and and implemented reflection for 26 which is probably the only thing anyone cares about in 26.

https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support.html

Funny how gcc seems to be the top dog now, what happened to clang? Thought their codebase was supposed to be easier and more pleasant to work with? Or maybe just more hardcore compiler devs work on gcc?

Relfection was a desperate need. Useful and difficult to design feature.

There are also things like template for or inplace_vector. I think it has useful things. Just not all things are useful to everyone.

Feature complete is a pretty hard goal to reach. It sounds like "added all the features" but is closer to "bug compatible across compilers" (not saying there are bugs just that recent versions have removed a lot of wiggle room for implementations)

Also modules was a lot and was kind of the reason it took so long. They are wonderful and I want them but proper implementations (even with many details being implementation defined) required a lot of work to figure out.

Most of the time all the compilers get ahead of the actual release but in that case there were so many uncertainties only rough implementations were available beforehand and then post release they had to make adjustments to how they handled incremental compilation in a user facing way effectively.

Ironically the C++ standards consortium doesn’t want C to improve anymore and wants people to just use C++. Rules for thee but not for me.

Stabilizing C as the language of the operating system and keeping it simple isn't without benefits.

But I do think the frustration that C++ can no longer be a super set of C is overblown by C++.

C++ isn't great but so far I haven't seen anything I'd rather use.

I think you need to spend more time with literally any tool -- "Haven't seen anything I'd rather used" reads like "Haven't gotten over the initial learning curve with any other tool"

C++ is sub-optimal for almost any task. For low level stuff plain C or maybe Rust. for higher level Python, Lua, or some Lisp. C++ is a weird in-between language that's impossible to hold correctly.

> For low level stuff plain C

The nice thing about C++ is that you can more or less turn it into C, if you want. My C++ code is closer to C than idiomatic, modern C++, but I wouldn't want to miss the nice parts that C++ adds, such as lambda functions and the occasional template for generalization. Pretty much the only thing I'm missing from C are order-independent designated initializers, which became order-dependent in C++, and thus useless.

> "Haven't seen anything I'd rather used" reads like "Haven't gotten over the initial learning curve with any other tool"

What an odd thing to say. I simply don't like certain design decisions in other languages that I've checked out and tried, and therefore do not see any reason to switch. E.g. I tried Rust, but it's absolutely terrible for quick&dirty prototyping, which is my main job.

Some other language need to step up and rewrite/replace LLVM then, because no language that relies on a ~30 million loc backend written in C++ can ever hope to replace it.

Languages don't write code, people do. No one has rewritten LLVM because it already exists, and such a project would be insanely expensive for little benefit.

Zig plans to make LLVM optional. Rust has Cranelift. Go afaik has no dependencies on the C++ ecosystem including LLVM. Python and some other languages are built with C, not C++. So, progress is being made slowly to replace LLVM as the defacto optimizing code backend. Alternatives are out there, may they compete and win! C++ makes me pessimistic about the future of humanity..

A bureau from the top call is not the way to do it.

Just beat it. Ah, not so easy huh? Libraries, ecosystem, real use, continuous improvements.

Even if it does not look so "clean".

Just beat it, I will move to the next language. I am still waiting.

C with classes is a very simplistic view of C++.

I for one can write C++ but I cannot write a single program in C. If the overlap was so vast, I would be able to write good C but I cannot.

I've done things with templates to express my ideas in C++ that I cannot do in other languages, and the behaviour of deterministic destructors is what sets it apart from C. It is comprehensible and readable to me.

I would argue that C++ is modern, since it is in use today. Perhaps your definition of "modern" is too narrow?

I mean the Carbon project exists

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