C++ launched its community survey, too

[H. S. Teoh]

On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 01:33:18PM -0700, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[...]
> The main problem with that is that the fact that as soon as you're
> willing to break backwards compatability in C++, then you lose one of
> the major benefits of C++ (that the same code compiles pretty much
> forever)

Not strictly true.  My old C++98 project no longer compiled with the
latest g++, because it contained things allowed in C++98 that are no
longer allowed in C++17.  Some things were relatively simple to fix, but
others were quite painful to fix, so I ended up using --std=c++11 as a
workaround instead.  In the frustrating process of trying to fix things
C++17 complains about, I threw in the towel and decided to rewrite it in
D instead.


[...]
> The other problem is that many of C++'s problems come from being a
> superset of C, which is also a huge strength, and it would be a pretty
> huge blow to C++ if it couldn't just #include C code and use it as if
> it were C++.

Not strictly true either.  Most modern C header files come wrapped with:

	#ifdef __cplusplus
	extern "C" {
	#endif

	...

	#ifdef __cplusplus
	}
	#endif __cplusplus

because without that, a lot of C headers actually would *not* compile.

Granted, though, this is a lot easier than having to write JNI wrappers
or (carefully!) translate C headers into D.  It would be nice if you
could actually just copy-n-paste a C header into an extern(C) block in D
and have it Just Work(tm), but practically all C headers are dependent
on macros one way or another that it would require including an entire C
processor inside the D compiler, which is not exactly an inviting
proposition.


> To truly fix C++ while retaining many of its strengths would require
> fixing C as well, and that's not happening.
[...]

Actually, C and C++ have already somewhat diverged. The C subset of C++
is an actually older dialect of C, and no longer 100% compatible with
modern C.  Though it's true that it's still 95% compatible, which is
Good Enough(tm) for most purposes.


T

-- 
A program should be written to model the concepts of the task it performs rather than the physical world or a process because this maximizes the potential for it to be applied to tasks that are conceptually similar and, more important, to tasks that have not yet been conceived. -- Michael B. Allen