C++0x Finally Becomes a Standard 398
Samfer writes "On Friday August 12th 2011, the results for the final ISO ballot on C++0x came in, and the ISO C++ Standards Committee were unanimous in favor of approving the new C++0x (for now unofficially known as C++11) object-oriented programming language standard which is intended to replace the existing C++ standard. The new standard is to offer new and improved features such as lambda functions, concurrent programming functionality, direct data field initialization, and an improved standard library to name but a few."
Although I haven't heavily used C++ in years, it is nice to see a decade long effort finally come to fruition. Especially nice is the support for type inference which should save quite a few people from RSI and make refactoring code a bit less obnoxious.
Congratulations! (Score:0, Interesting)
They said it couldn't be done!
They doubted us!
But we did it!
The ugliest, most fragile, hackiest, most garbled, incoherent, biggest mess of a programming language is now even more so!
Nice, but maybe irrelevant. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's nice that they finally got the standard done. But there's so much junk in there. The C++ committee was dominated by people who wanted to do cool things with templates.
Some years ago, someone figured out that it was possible to abuse the C++ template system into doing arbitrary computations at compile time. This developed a fan club. That fan club has dominated the C++ standards committee, because nobody else cared. So now we have a standard for C++ which supports template-based programming a little better.
Current thinking seems to be that,while template programming is too hard for ordinary programmers, the templates will be written by l33t programmers and then be used by the lower classes. Unfortunately, if anything goes wrong, the end user has to look at the innards of the template to find the problem. We went through this with LISP decades ago. Check out the MIT Loop Macro [cmu.edu], That finally became stable about the time LISP died out.
Note what isn't in the new C++. There's no more memory safety than in the old one. (Fans will say that it's safer if you only use the new features. Now try to call some library that doesn't use them.) So the buffer overflow attacks and crashes will continue.
C++ is the only language to offer hiding without memory safety. Hard-compiled languages from Pascal through Go have hiding with safety, as do all the major scripting languages. C has neither hiding nor safety; the pointer manipulations are right there in the source. There have been safe, hard-compiled languages without garbage collection, most notably Ada and the Modula family. Safety and speed are not incompatible.
Re:Clean cool crisp refreshing (Score:4, Interesting)
(+ A (* B C) (* A D))
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Re:Clean cool crisp refreshing (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:nice, but still missing... (Score:4, Interesting)
Early on, the C++0x spec had "opt-in" garbage collection, which was perfect! You'd declare a pointer as a garbage collected pointer if you wanted that, but otehrwise no GC. That was useful for cyclic data structures, and otherwise you could ignore it.
Sadly, missing from the final spec.
Re:nice, but still missing... (Score:4, Interesting)
After a month of coding Java and never having to worry every time I typed "new" I never looked back.
Modern C++ programmers don't need worry about typing "new" either; they use smart pointers to handle the "garbage collection" for them. Works great, and avoids the unpredictability, overhead, and performance problems of a garbage collection thread.
(yes, I know it's possible for reference-counting to leak if you introduce a cycle into the graph. That said, in the last ten years of C++ program, that problem has bit me exactly zero times)