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21st Century C++

Accepted submission by fliptop at 2025-02-24 15:19:17 from the the-future-for-a-45-year-old-language dept.
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fliptop [soylentnews.org] writes:

Over at ACM.org, Bjarne Stroustrup [acm.org] presents the key contemporary C++ mechanism designed to maintain compatibility over decades [acm.org]:

It is now 45+ years since C++ was first conceived. As planned, it evolved to meet challenges, but many developers use C++ as if it was still the previous millennium. This is suboptimal from the perspective of ease of expressing ideas, performance, reliability, and maintainability. Here, I present the key concepts on which performant, type safe, and flexible C++ software can be built: resource management, life-time management, error-handling, modularity, and generic programming. At the end, I present ways to ensure that code is contemporary, rather than relying on outdated, unsafe, and hard-to-maintain techniques: guidelines and profiles.

The article lays out the ideals and talks about resource management, modularity and generic programming, among other topics. It concludes:

C++ was designed to evolve. When I started, not only didn’t I have the resources to design and implement my ideal language, but I also understood that I needed the feedback from use to turn my ideals into practical reality. And evolve it did while staying true to its fundamental aims24. Contemporary C++ (C++23) is a much better approximation to the ideals than any earlier version, including support for better code quality, type safety, expressive power, performance, and for a much wider range of application areas.

However, the evolutionary approach caused some serious problems. Many people got stuck with an outdated view of what C++ is. Today, we still see endless mentions of the mythical language C/C++, usually implying a view of C++ as a minor extension of C embodying all the worst aspects of C together with grotesque misuses of complex C++ features. Other sources describe C++ as a failed attempt to design Java. Also, tool support in areas such as package management and build systems have lagged because of a community focus on older styles of use.

Original Submission