Should have a (2024) annotation so far as I can see (haven't finished reading the article but it seems to be about events which have "just happened" back then)
Very interesting summary of facts and quotations with conclusions. I would say there are even more camps than the two mentioned. Personally I think C++98 and Qt5 just worked and were good enough for all purposes, and C++ since has become an ever moving target with a lot of incompatibilities between compilers. Chasing for the ever latest version of the language and compilers is very expensive and enervating. I prefer how they solved this e.g. in the Ada community; they take their time for the release a new standard version, and until then, most compiler vendors have already updated their products and there was relevant experience with the new features long before the new standard was passed. In computer science, it seems to be a law of nature to keep "improving" good things until they become unusable and people walk away. In C++ I did so; I have a few C++11 code bases (some back ported from newer versions), but most are C++98/03; I even made a fork of Qt5 (LeanQt) with my own build system (BUSY) which is less work to maintain than continuously chasing new compiler/tool incompatibilities among platforms.
I understand the issue about the ever-moving target etc., but almost fifteen years later do you really believe C++98 is better than C++11 without move semantics and decent smart pointers? I remember working with Qt5 and C++98 and yes, it was productive, but it was also a mess of intricate object ownership.
I'm critical about some choices made with C++20 and after, like the mess that modules are, and the too-little-too-late ranges library. C++26 is also a joke imho. But on the other hand, working with std::optional and (in C++23) std::expected is so much better than without. The thing is nobody forces you to use every single feature of a new standard, but I would not recommend ignoring very good tools just for the sake of it.
For all of my projects it is good enough. C++11 onwards has a few advantages, but I don't need them. Moving ownership between containers to avoid allocations was possible with the standard library even before C++11, and Qt offered "implicit sharing" which has a similar effect without syntax changes and incompatibilities. Even with my C++11 projects (e.g. https://github.com/rochus-keller/eigen/) I had to take care still in 2024 which feature not to use on MSVC because it didn't work or behaved differently. I never have any ownership issues and I implement large compiler projects with different AST and IR layers. All my projects still compile with https://github.com/rochus-keller/leanqt/ on all platforms. I would never trade a tiny language advantage with a whole world of dependability issues. One day I will revive and refactor GCC 4.7 to get a cross-platform C++98 with parts of 11 compiler just written in C, then latest all of my software is buildable "from first principles".
PS: it's funny I wrote my comment three days (and not an hour) ago.
C++26 will allow billions of lines of pointless serialization boilerplate to finally be deleted, adding the basic reflection functionality that most other languages have had for decades.
Yes, C++26 reflection is nice, but also extremely complex to understand and use well. The rest of C++26 is the usual series of too-little-too-late additions. Meanwhile I’m still waiting for pattern matching to become a thing (a proposal has been discussed for ages)
You can incrementally refactor existing code to make it more maintainable and easier to implement the things you are working on.
The issue with Netscape (per that article) was that it was a rewrite, not a refactor. I.e. replacing all the existing code with new code. That's why it took a long time to release a new version: the previous code hadn't changed and the new code wasn't functionally equivalent to the existing code, let alone have any new features.
It's a committee, many people are involved, all with different opinions, but any decision requires consensus.
Why would anyone expect big broad changes? And historically, whenever they did happen anyway through forced compromise, they resulted in failure because they were not consistently implemented.
The only way that works is small compatible and iterative changes.
I think that the steering committee currently considers that backwards compatibility has higher priority compared to strict memory safety. When the priorities will inverse then solutions will be found.
> Google supposedly significantly lowered its participation in the C++ development process, and instead started to work on their own C++ successor language.
Did they decide to keep things as is or rewrite in Rust with LLM assistance in the couple years since this article? Carbon seems to have gone nowhere.
At least as far as public info goes it's still being worked on. The GitHub repo [0] has pretty consistent activity and some recent-ish talks [1], one of which says that they are considering a 0.1 release "early next year".
also at the time this is what HN wrote about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42231489
I'm critical about some choices made with C++20 and after, like the mess that modules are, and the too-little-too-late ranges library. C++26 is also a joke imho. But on the other hand, working with std::optional and (in C++23) std::expected is so much better than without. The thing is nobody forces you to use every single feature of a new standard, but I would not recommend ignoring very good tools just for the sake of it.
PS: it's funny I wrote my comment three days (and not an hour) ago.
Not much has changed, though, it still is. Just with a lot more bells and whistles around it
C++26 will allow billions of lines of pointless serialization boilerplate to finally be deleted, adding the basic reflection functionality that most other languages have had for decades.
Refactoring work, terrain tested code?!?
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
The issue with Netscape (per that article) was that it was a rewrite, not a refactor. I.e. replacing all the existing code with new code. That's why it took a long time to release a new version: the previous code hadn't changed and the new code wasn't functionally equivalent to the existing code, let alone have any new features.
Past discussion (653 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42231489
Why would anyone expect big broad changes? And historically, whenever they did happen anyway through forced compromise, they resulted in failure because they were not consistently implemented.
The only way that works is small compatible and iterative changes.
Did they decide to keep things as is or rewrite in Rust with LLM assistance in the couple years since this article? Carbon seems to have gone nowhere.
At least as far as public info goes it's still being worked on. The GitHub repo [0] has pretty consistent activity and some recent-ish talks [1], one of which says that they are considering a 0.1 release "early next year".
[0]: https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang
[1]: https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang#2026