Stroustrup's talk on C++0x

[Bill Baxter]

Walter Bright wrote:
> Bill Baxter wrote:
>> Walter Bright wrote:

> GC is a prime example of that; C++ could no longer dismiss it. (And Hans 
> Boehm, who I admire a lot, did a spectacular job of dealing with every 
> objection to adding GC.)

I decided to download his GC for C++ recently to give it a try.  I was 
amazed to find that the documentation is really quite bad from a user 
point of view.  And what little user doc there was was mostly about the 
C interface.  If you care about implementation, there's tons to read, 
but just not if you're interested in actually *using* it.  I expected a 
little more pleasant user experience given how long its been around, how 
much I hear about it here and there, and how often I've heard C++ people 
say that you don't need GC in the language because you can just download 
Boehm's library.


> It took 5 years for a C++98 compliant compiler to emerge. Extrapolating 
> to C++09, that would be 2014 to get features that existed in D years 
> ago. I obviously gave up waiting for such features from C++ long ago.

Well, that's true, but when comparing availability C++09 vs D, you 
should perhaps be a little more forgiving, given that D isn't quite done 
either.  Sure, some C++09 features are available in D now, but some are 
also available in g++ now, I believe.  And there are some features 
slated for  C++ 09 that aren't on the roadmap for D at all (like 
concepts and thread stuff), which might appear in some C++ compiler 
before they appear D.  Furthermore, I'm pretty sure some partially 
conforming C++98 compilers existed before the end of 93, so what I'm 
trying to say with all this is that if you're a programmer who's willing 
to work with an incompatible language that is has an ever-evolving spec, 
then you're probably also willing to use a bleeding edge C++ compiler 
that only partially supports the C++09 spec.  So there may be less of a 
wait than 2014 for the sort of bleeding edgers who would be interested 
in D in the first place.  But either way its still infinitely more 
waiting than "download and use it right now" -- the current situation 
with D.

--bb