C++ needs to modernize its legacy #include mechanism to be really a new language | Hacker News Reader

C++ needs to modernize its legacy #include mechanism to be really a new language

codergears.com

23 pointsjoebaf13 comments

The hilarious thing is that you'll still end up with code mixing the two idioms, because legacy.

You don't usually improve the standard for legacy code. You want backward compatibility, sure, but the expectation that a new standard automatically makes old code not suck is just setting you up to be disappointed.

What C++ has allowed us to do is slowly (sometimes wholesale), add the new stuff to old code or just write new code that doesn't suck as much.

I have always thought that C++ took the wrong route here. Backward compatibility can be solved via a compiler flag too. So the language can evolve, and deprecate older sub-awesome solutions, while allowing people to still use that via a "--my-code-still-uses-feature-x-and-i-dont-want-to-update" compiler flag.

You could have deprecated :

- #includes and have a decent mechanism

- std::pair when you introduce std::tuple

- perhaps new when you have make_shared and make_unique

- etc etc.

There's also a gentle push towards the more recent solutions as at one point compiler vendors will not maintain these flags forever because it's no longer part of the language.

The presence of a language feature is already signalled via the __cplusplus define, so it is already done that way.

I think C++ is very pragmatic in the way it has been done so far, but I am not looking forward to the new __* keywords for resumable functions. I think it's fair to steal the "await" and "yield" keywords back from programmers so my eyes don't bleed. I've already been conditioned to treat __whatever as a platform-specific thing to avoid in my code.

This article is mostly a copy/paste of http://clang.llvm.org/docs/Modules.html

This article is specified in the post as the origin of the disadvantages of include mechanism.

Yes, that is true, but the article does not provide much technical meat other than that list.

please fix article grammar

Ironic or facetious?

Go fuck yourself

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