Comment by jodrellblank

https://izzys.casa/2024/11/on-safe-cxx/ is a long and opinionated drama and swear-filled read on the topic. snips from it:

> "many people reading this might be familiar with the addition of the very powerful #embed preprocessor directive that was added to C. This is literally years of work brought about by one person, and that is JeanHeyd Meneide. JeanHeyd is a good friend and also the current editor of the C standard. And #embed started off as the std::embed proposal. Man, if only everyone in the world knew what the C++ committee did to fucking shut that shit down..."

> ... "Herb [Sutter] ... spun up a Study Group, SG15, at the recommendation of GDR to handling “tooling” in the C++ ecosystem. This of course, paved the way for modules to get absolutely fucking steamrolled into the standard while allowing SG15 to act as a buffer preventing any change to modules lest they be devoid of Bjarne [Stroustrup] and Gaby [Gabriel Dos Reis]’s vision. Every single paper that came out of SG15 during this time was completely ignored."

> "Gaby [Gabriel Dos Reis] is effectively Bjarne’s protégé. ... when it came to modules Gaby had to “prove himself” by getting modules into the language. Usually, the standard requires some kind of proof of implementation. This is because of the absolute disaster that was export template, a feature that no compiler that could generate code ever implemented. Thus, proof of modules workability needed to be given. Here’s where I bring in my personal conspiracy theory. The only instance of modules being used prior to their inclusion in the standard was a single email to the C++ mailing lists (please recall the amount of work the committee demanded from JeanHeyd for std::embed) where Gaby claimed that the Microsoft Edge team was using the C++ Modules TS via a small script that ran NMake and was “solving their problem perfectly”." ... the face she made when I asked [a Microsoft Employee] about Gaby’s statement signaled to me that the team was not happy. Shortly after modules were confirmed for C++20, the Microsoft Edge team announced they were throwing their entire codebase into the goddamn garbage and just forking Chromium... Gaby Dos Reis fucking lied, but at least Bjarne got what he wanted. ... This isn’t the first time Gaby has lied regarding modules, obviously...."

> ... "This [different] paper is just frankly insulting to anyone who has done the work to make safer C++ syntax, going on to call (or at least allude to) Sean Baxter’s proposal an “ad hoc collection of features”. Yet another case of Gaby’s vagueries where he can feign ignorance. As if profiles themselves are not ad hoc attributes, that have the exact same problem that Bjarne and others argue against, specifically that of the virality of features. The C++ committee has had 8 years (8 long fucking years) to worry about memory safety in C++, and they’ve ignored it. Sean Baxter’s implementation for both lifetime and concurrency safety tracking has been done entirely in his Circle compiler [which] is a clean room, from the ground up, implementation of a C++ compiler. If you can name anyone who has written a standards conforming C++ compiler frontend and parser and then added metaprogramming and Rust’s lifetime annotation features to it, I will not believe you until you show them to me. Baxter’s proposal, P3390 for Safe C++ has a very large run down on the various features available to us..."

> "Bjarne has been going off the wall for a while now regarding memory safety. Personally I think NASA moving to Rust hurt him the most. He loves to show that image of the Mars rover in his talks. One of the earliest outbursts he’s had regarding memory safety is a very common thing I’ve seen which is getting very mad that the definition a group is using is not the definition he would use and therefore the whole thing is a goddamn waste of time."

> "You can also look at how Bjarne and others talk about Rust despite clearly having never used it. And in specifically in Bjarne’s case he hasn’t even used anything outside of Visual Studio! It’s all he uses. He doesn’t even know what a good package manager would look like, because he doesn’t fucking care. He doesn’t care about how asinine of an experience that wrangling dependencies feels like, because he doesn’t have to. He has never written any actual production code. It is all research code at best, it is all C++, he does not know any other language."

> "Orson Scott Card didn't write Ender's Game [link] -> Ender's Game is an apologia for Hitler"

> "this isn’t a one off situation. It isn’t simply just Bjarne who does this. John Lakos of Bloomberg has also done this historically, getting caught recording conversations during the closing plenary meeting for the Kona 2019 meeting because he didn’t get his way with contracts. Ville is another, historically insulting members and contributors alike (at one point suggesting that the response to a rejected paper should be “fuck you, and your proposal”), and I’m sure there are others, but I’m not about to run down a list of names and start diagnosing people like I’m a prominent tumblr or deviantart user in 2017."

> "the new proposed (but not yet approved) Boost website. This is located at boost.io and I’m not going to turn that into a clickable link, and that’s because this proposed website brings with it a new logo. This logo features a Nazi dog whistle. The Nazi SS lightning bolts. Here’s a side by side of the image with and without the bolts being drawn over (Please recall that Jon Kalb, who went out of his way to initially defend Arthur O’Dwyer, serves on the C++ Alliance Board)."

> "Arthur O’Dwyer has learnt to keeps his hands to himself, he does not pay attention to or notice boundaries and really only focuses on his personal agenda. To quote a DM sent to me by a C++ community member about Arthur’s behavior “We are all NPCs to him”. He certainly doesn’t give a shit. He’s been creating sockpuppets, and using proxies to get his changes into the LLVM and Clang project. Very normal behavior by the way."

> "This is the state C++ is in, though as I’ve said plenty of times in this post, don’t get it twisted. Bjarne ain’t no Lord of Cinder. We’re stuck in a cycle of people joining the committee to try to improve the language, burning out and leaving, or staying and becoming part of the cycle of people who burn out the ones who leave."