I think this page describes "what" but not "why" of Carbon.
Carbon exists so that it's possible to migrate a large C++ code base, like Chrome, from C++ to something saner, incrementally.
The most important attribute of Carbon is not the specifics of the syntax but the fact that it's designed to be used in a mixed C++ / Carbon code base and comes with tooling to convert as much of C++ as possible to Carbon.
That's what makes Carbon different from any other language: D, Zig, Nim, Rust etc.
It's not possible to port a millions line C++ code base, like Chrome, to another language so large C++ projects are stuck with objectively pretty bad language and are forced to continue to use C++ even though a better language might exist.
That's why Carbon is designed for incremental adoption in large C++ projects: you can add Carbon code to existing C++ code and incrementally port C++ over to Carbon until only Carbon code exists.
Still a very large investment but at least possible and not dissimilar to refactoring to adopt newer C++ features like e.g. replacing use of std::string with std::string_view.
That's why it's a rational project for Google. Even though it's a large investment, it might pay off if they can write new software in Carbon instead of C++ and refactor old code into Carbon.
Not to disagree, but to amplify - FWIW, most of what you say was also the sales pitch for C++ over ANSI C in the early 90s vs. the "pure Java" mentality that shortly followed in the late 90s (with a megaton of Sun Microsystems marketing to re-write almost everything rather than bridge with JNI). People neglect how practical incrementalism can be.
Also, FWIW, it is very ergonomic for Nim to call C (though the reverse is made complex by GC'd types). { I believe similar can be said for other PLangs you mention, but I am not as sure. } It's barely an inconvenience. Parts of Nim's stdlib still use libc and many PLangs do that for at least system calls. You can also just convert C to Nim with the c2nim program, though usually that requires a lot of hand editing afterwards.
Maybe they should write a C++2carbon translator tool? That would speed things up for them. Maybe they already have and I just haven't heard of it? I mean the article does say "some level of source-to-source translation", but I couldn't find details/caveats poking around for a few minutes.
Nim 2 doesn’t require gc, with arc/atomicArc. The only thing you really need to be careful about is when you use ref types or custom owning types. Otherwise, manual memory management can be done in Nim pretty easily.
Hypothetically you could importcpp fns, classes, etc when compiling with nim cpp
But couldn’t one argue that’s true of most languages, they promise incremental progress toward rewriting your behemoth into miniature monoliths? I think the only one where they clearly drew the line at being able to pull in headers is .Net. You just can’t do it. Others like Golang or rust, you can point to the C headers and bam…
Honestly, while I find the syntax terse, I welcome more low level languages able to push performance.
These are strong points and I think the methodology behind Carbon is the correct one. The elephant in the room is that once Google decide to drop Carbon my existing code base will be dependant on a dead technology and then I am screwed.
I find it hard to trust Google to maintain any software nor to write software that is maintainable by a community. They write software for themselves and themselves alone.
If it (purportedly?) exists so that Google can move multi-million line code bases from C++ to something better bit-by-bit, because it's otherwise infeasible to do so, why would Google drop it after they have ported the first million?
You could do this with Nim, Nim 2’s ARC model is compatible with c++’s RAII. Nim supports moves, destructors, copies, etc. see https://nim-lang.org/docs/destructors.html
You can import C++ classes, member functions, free functions, etc. easily with importcpp
importcpp for the code you are incrementally porting over. You could write a libclang script to do this for you. Exportcpp for what you any code that have been ported but have dependencies in C++ land.
My best guess is they want C++ compatibility and a new language due to preferences, more control over the compiler, etc. which are all valid reasons
What I would like to see is more documentation on the "why not" that summarizes why other languages and proposals are not sufficient. For example, Safe C++ proposal[1] appears to satisfy all requirements, but I can't find any reference to it.
The reason the Safe C++ proposal wasn't mentioned is that it came years later. =] I'll see if it makes sense for us to update that section a bit, this probably isn't the only thing that we should refresh a bit to reflect the last few years of developments.
FWIW, the biggest challenge with Safe C++ is that WG21 rejected[1] that direction. And it was developed without building a governance model or way to evolve outside of WG21, and so doesn't seem to have a credible path forward.
[1]: FWIW, some members of WG21 don't agree with this characterizationp, but both the author's impression and the practical effect was to reject the direction.
Did Safe C++ ever have a full, correct, fully compliant, reference implementation, or was there only (closed-source) Circle as some kind of reference implementation? Circle, as far as I know, is closed-source.
The real "why" is because, unlike other languages, Google can't strong-arm or bribe C++'s ISO committee into doing its bidding, and that has caused problems for Google in the past. Carbon is a language born out of a corporate hissy fit.
Depends on how much people one sends to WG21 voting sessions, some folks at Reddit would assert contracts only got into C++26, thanks to Bloomberg votes.
It's a great feature, and D has a bunch of support for this kind of thing.
But D and C++ have just enough differences to make extern(C++) not be automatic. It can take some pretty arcane metaprogramming to get things to work, and some things are impossible.
It's also worth pointing out that D isn't trying to be fully compatible with C++.
In which way is C++ an "objectively pretty bad language"?
I have done C++ for a living and it is not the easiest but there is tooling and warnings as errors that catch a lot of the errors before even you make a mistake.
It is true that packaging is more challenging but it is also true that it is very configurable ro squeeze performance as much as possible (which is on of C++'s niches). And by squeezing I mean beyond setting a release build. You could for example decide to go with LTO + PGO + remove position independent code and do static linking for all dependencies, for example.
You can do virtually anything that no other language can do and whwn you need it, believe me it is useful.
But you can still code every day code wirh your lambdas, ranges, smart pointers and virtual interfaces.
I understand C++ has some baggage but is is very far from being an "objectively bad language" in ly opinion. More so if you take into account its performance and library availability, which is second to none for almost any task, except maybe for the typical enterprise-like Java app or web stuff, byt niw C++26 will include reflection and annotations, so this could be a game changer.
Explicitly and between the lines, Carruth and Google have made it clear that the “bad” part of C++ from their perspective is the standards committee.
In particular, the committee’s unwillingness to make ABI-breaking changes to the language, or more abstractly, to consider the needs of organizations with huge active code bases at least as seriously as those with huge legacy code bases.
> Carbon exists so that it's possible to migrate a large C++ code base, like Chrome, from C++ to something saner, incrementally.
_Incrementally_: a C++ project can be incrementally made more sane also using constructs to avoid and constructs to use once the problem domain is confined. In my past, I had successfully implemented this quest for 3 different fairly large C++ projects. This is not a strong selling point for carbon.
Once you've done this work though, what stops the codebase from slowly drifting back into the less sane realm it previously resided in? It seems pretty reasonable to be concerned that a company that produced a messy codebase once is capable of making it messy again, and given that turnover is inevitable in the long term (which is the timeframe that seems relevant given that long-term compatibility in C++ codebases is kind of the whole reason this discussion is happening), it doesn't seem like relying on an individual to enforce the rules is super viable. The obvious way to enforce this sort of thing is through tooling, and there's no tool more powerful than literally making it impossible to express the undesirable code in the language itself in the first place.
You're right that incrementally rewriting isn't much of an advantage over C++ itself, but I think you're missing the point that the emphasis on "incremental" is to highlight the advantage in rewriting C++ code in Carbon over alternatives that don't provide as much compatibility (with Rust being somewhat notorious for being suggested by outside parties as a target for rewriting in whenever discussions about C++ codebases happen). The argument for Carbon over C++ isn't specifically that it can be rewritten incrementally, but that it's just a better language, which has benefits _after_ the rewrite. To be clear, I'm sure that someone could come up with reasonable objections to that claim as well, but I think it's distinct from the part you're objecting to, and it's worth treating as a separate concern.
One other use case I could think of is gaming, where there is an incredible amount of load-bearing C++ code that's never realistically going to be rewritten, and strict memory safety is not necessarily a sine qua non in the way it is in other fields.
> It's not possible to port a millions line C++ code base, like Chrome, to another language so large C++ projects are stuck with objectively pretty bad language and are forced to continue to use C++ even though a better language might exist.
One good aspect about C++ is its backwards compatibility or stability. Also a drawback, but companies not having to spend huge amounts of time, expertise and money rewriting their whole codebases all the time is something they appreciate.
Might worth noting that this change technically doesn't violate Rust's stability guarantees since type inference changes and/or adding new impls are exempt. Of course, that doesn't really help with the question of whether this change should have been made in the given timeframe (as opposed to the socket struct change IIRC?), but that ship has long sailed.
If you've seen this before, it's worth looking at the 2025 roadmap – it's long-term work, a full safety story hasn't been quite figured out (TBD end 2025), and 0.1 is TBD end 2026. About the pace of Rust, although without the active forum that Rust had in its early days.
What _is_ interesting is that I get the impression that Carbon is being workshopped with the C++ community, rather than the wider PLT community -- I worry that they won't benefit from the broader perspectives that'll help it avoid well-known warts elsewhere.
> What _is_ interesting is that I get the impression that Carbon is being workshopped with the C++ community, rather than the wider PLT community -- I worry that they won't benefit from the broader perspectives that'll help it avoid well-known warts elsewhere.
FWIW, we're working hard whenever looking at an aspect of the language to look at other languages beyond C++ and learn any and everything we can from them. Lots of our design proposals cite Swift, Rust, Go, TypeScript, Python, Kotlin, C#, Java, and even Scala.
Make sure you're checking out Hylo. I'm not sure that its ideas are right for Carbon, but if you're looking for a credible alternative to Rust's take on safety, I think it's one of the better ones.
Chandler I would love to be involved in Carbon development to shape its development to be usable at my company or alternatively to use it in my own projects. What is the best way to stay involved in Carbon development? Just the discord?
Main goal for Carbon is to port existing code first, general purpose second, with Google internal teams as main customer.
If it ever goes beyond that remains to be seen.
The Carbon team is the first to point out that anyone doing green field development should reach out to Rust or any managed language that fits the project scope.
Honestly seems like a dubious idea. The C++ community that remains are even more "just get good" than before. They still think UB all over the place is fine.
I think that might be true of the language committee, but there's presumably a huge crowd of people with existing c++ code bases that would like to have a different path forward than just hoping that the committee changes priorities.
Some part of it want C++ to be Rust, with a focus on compile-time safety. Others take "C++" literally as "C with extra stuff" and value performance over safety.
Companies like Google are likely to be in the former camp, as for what they are doing, security is critical. Unsurprisingly, Carbon is a Google project.
Video game companies on the other hand are likely to be in the latter camp. Most of the times, security is not as critical, especially for offline games, and memory corruption usually don't go further than a game crash. Tight memory management however is critical, and it often involves raw pointers and custom allocation schemes.
I think there are parallels with functional languages on the JVM. The parts that are the worst are the parts that were built for maximum interoperability. Not to mention that the JVM forces classes on you at the deepest opcode levels.
Compatibility with C++ is fine, but so far it seems carbon's safety story is entirely a wishlist rather than anything yet. Seems like Carbon might be a more of a place to demonstrate features for C++ committees than a real language?
Personally I have hand it up to here with lousy programmingn languages that make it easy for me to write bugs.
Given that Carbon's space is "languages with full interoperability with C++," I don't think D and Zig are in that space.
As to "getting it right" - things are not so simple. The emphasis on memory-safety soundness is based on some empirical hypotheses, some better founded than others, and it's unclear what "getting it right" means.
From a software correctness perspective, the road to sound memory safety is as follows: 1. We want to reduce the amount of costly bugs in software as cheaply as possible, 2. Memory unsafe operations are a common cause of many costly bugs, 3. Some or all memory bugs can be eliminated cheaply with sound language guarantees.
The problem is that 1. memory safety refers to several properties that don't all contribute equally to correctness (e.g. out-of-bounds access causes more serious bugs than use-after-free [1]), and 2. soundly guaranteeing different memory safety properties has different costs. It gets more complicated than that (e.g. there are also unsound techniques that have proven very effective to consider), but that's the overview.
It is, therefore, as of yet unclear which memory safety properties are worth it to soundly guarantee in the language, and the answer may depend on the language's other goals (and there must be other goals that are at least as important, because the empty language guarantees not only all memory safety properties but all (safety [2]) correctness properties, yet nobody uses it as it's useless, while a language like ATS can be used to write many useful programs, but few use it because it's just too costly to use well). The goal is always to find the right balance.
For example, Java soundly guarantees lack of use-after-free at the cost of increased memory footprint; that may be "getting it right" for some programs but not all. Rust soundly guarantees lack of use-after-free at the cost of imposing strong and elaborate typesystem constraints (that, as is often the case, are more constraining than the property they guarantee); that, too, may be "getting it right" for some programs, though not all. Zig guarantees lack of out-of-bounds access in a simple language at the cost of not guaranteeing lack of use-after-free, and that may also be "getting it right" for some programs but not all.
So what "getting it right" means always depends on constraints other than safety (Rust and Zig want to consume less memory than Java; Java and Zig want to be simpler than Rust; Java and Rust want to guarantee more memory safety properties than Zig). If Carbon wants to be more interoperable with C++ than Java, Rust, or Zig, then it will have to figure out what "getting it right" means for Carbon.
> As to "getting it right" - things are not so simple. The emphasis on memory-safety soundness is based on some empirical hypotheses, some better founded than others, and it's unclear what "getting it right" means.
It means eliminating undefined behavior, and unplanned interaction between distant parts of the program.
It keeps adding keywords and it has become way harder to keep it in your head. It’s over 220 at this point. Don’t take my word for it, Swift creator doesn’t agree with its current direction either.
I remember back when carbon first appeared, I immediately thought it's not gonna get popular simply because it has "fn" and "var"
superficial details matter - people that stayed on C++ instead of transitioning to flashy new ones have type-before-name as part of programming identity
you can have all the features in the world (and be recognized by it), but if the code doesn't _look_ like C++, then it's of no interest
Well, the Carbon team primarily focusses on one customer: Google. If management decides "it's carbon now" then a few thousand developers will write carbon or change jobs. If they are then somewhat successful inside Google, people leaving will spread it.
I don't think it will reach the same distribution as other languages, as the niche is "large C++ projects, which want to transition to something else without rewrite" for anybody else there are a huge number of alternatives.
One could presumably compile arbitrary C++ to rust or D without changing semantics, then slowly go through the result making it look more native to the new language.
That would either be a wholesale conversion or emitting a translation shim style thing at the boundary between legacy c++ and the new language.
I'm not sure Carbon is necessary to achieve such a conversion.
I would be stunned if you could compile arbitrary c++ to rust or d, unless by "compile" you mean "painfully hand-translate and spend months fixing subtle errors". you are underestimating the sheer complexity of the language.
Agreed, but it would be much worse than you suggest. Many meaty C++ projects have an underlying architecture that could not even be expressed in (safe) Rust. The idea of transpiling a major C++ project and getting it running in Rust with only some minimal idiom fiddling seems utterly fantastical.
Implementation would be by modifying clang. Traverse the clang ast emitting the new language instead of llvm IR.
You wouldn't get idiomatic code out but with some effort you'd get rust/d/c/other which clang compiles to the same IR as the original.
How much refactoring is warranted afterwards would depend on how much effort you put in to recreating templates / header files / modules etc on the fly.
I'm not sure I'd choose to do this myself if I was in Google's position but it would be tempting.
This was essentially how DMD (the reference D compiler) was translated to D.
However this was mostly a restricted subset of C++ common to both of them, e.g. no diamond inheritance, no operator overloading whackiness.
[] here can be read as similar to <> in Rust, C#, Java, or C++ templates (but move the content after the `template` into the function declaration). It's not weird if you're familiar with generic programming (and C++ programmers, the target audience of Carbon right now, will all be familiar with it, they use it with their STL algorithms and collections if nothing else). The () is the ordinary "here is the parameter list" used in pretty much every C-syntax language. C doesn't have generics, so there are several ways people have extended that base C-ish syntax to support generics: <>, [], template<>, and a few others have all been done in the past.
`fn partition[T: ...]` uses `[]` to define T. `s: Slice(T)` uses `(T)` to invoke the type constructor `Slice` with the type argument T. So you could say that's fine because these are different operations.
But then defining a type constructor itself still uses `()`, like `class UnsafeAllowDelete(T:! Concrete) { ... }`. It does seem somewhat inconsistent.
I remember back when Rust was still in so much flux that there were regular discussions about syntax, and there was a proposal very similar to the syntax of carbon: square brackets for generics and type annotations, parens for indexing, etc. It was basically turned down because they wanted to win over C++ devs. I still wish it was the favored outcome...it looks so much cleaner and less jarring.
Nah, IMO they're both pretty suboptimal, and if Rust is going to choose between two bad options, it might as well choose the overwhelmingly familiar option. (Sadly, my strong opinions on what type parameter and indexing syntax should look like are too large for this margin to contain.)
Zig seems like a better approach but I still remember the carbon C killer video from fireship before that channel was bought by vc funding and turned into AI slop news reporter most likely using AI.
I don't even watch fireship anymore. I actively resist the urge to. There are some other better channels like typecraft or primagen or dreams of code and so many other enthusiasts, there is this one bash guy that I watch whose having fun in life doing side quests like going to gym and gardening and I am all for that too.
> Making destructors implicitly virtual in polymorphic classes
Not sure what to think of this one. Either one introduces a new keyword to opt out (not great), or all public destructors of an abstract base class are implicitly marked virtual (not great and another "hidden" language feature like threadsafe-statics).
After all, an abstract base class does not need its destructor to be public.
This language changes too much and too little all at the same time. It creates a burden on the developers without lifting many of the burdens of C++.
I can imagine the thought process behind the designers of the language went as follows:
"It's not possible to improve C++ without breaking backwards compatibility"
"That's correct, but if we're going to break backwards compatibility anyways, why not use this as an opportunity to change a bunch of things?"
aka the python 3 mentality, where necessary changes were combined with unnecessary changes that caused pointless migration costs. The fallacy is derived from the fact that breaking backwards compatibility is considered a massive fixed cost due to the fact that libraries have to be updated, therefore adding small incremental costs will not meaningfully increase overall cost. In reality the fixed cost of breaking backwards compatibility can be reduced massively if the proper care is taken, which means all the "just because" changes that were thrown in as a bonus, end up representing a much larger share of the migration cost than initially anticipated.
Chandler Carruth and his Carbon team might be both incompetent and dishonest. Is he and his team just scamming Google while working effectively without accountability, racking in money? How have they not gotten further? Why does the language seem so incompetently and carelessly designed? Do they put any effort or thought into it?
It's become a pet peeve of mine, but for the love of God, if anyone with input in Carbon is scanning this, what can be done to use "func" instead of "fn" as a keyword?
That all-consonant keyword always makes it seem like I'm reading Hungarian notation when reading Rust for instance. An other options I've seen for instance in Pony, "fun", is already an English word with a completely different meaning.
Even the "function" from Javascript seems fine to me.
I don't even code in kotlin but I know that kotlin has function as fun :P
Such small things as using __ __ in python and small inconveniences (lua's 1 instead of 0) really has a lot of people, what do I say.. yea, polarized on this matter.
"func" is fine; "function" is too long. "fn" is also good, but for example, Go was designed with "func," and it's one of the most successful, readable languages in the world, so why not?
The c++ notation for functions (and types in general) is horrible, and makes parsing much more expensive than it needs to be. Fixing it is step one if you are making a modern language.
Since interop is such a big design goal I wonder if fn was chosen after analyzing the impact of alternative keywords present in large c++ code based that would impact interop in a negative way (eg requiring more escaping).
In C++ you can use indifferently either the class or typename keyword to introduce template arguments (because of course you can). A lot of styleguides suggest using typename because class is slightly misleading (the type could be anything not just a class).
In practice everybody just uses class, because who as the time to type the full keyword and signature declarations in C++ are already unwieldy as it is.
It's the other way around. Modern languages and grammars use explicit leading keywords to clearly indicate what sort of context they're about to parse, rather than blindly forging ahead in a superposition while waiting for some future sequence of tokens to clarify what the context is.
It's hard for a naive parser (one-token lookahead, for example), to tell after parsing `const add = (` if this defines a function or a variable.
A "function" keyword often exists just to help the parser. C3, for example, to simply the parser of its language that's a superset of C, adds a "fn" keyword for this very purpose of disambiguation.
That looks like a variable that points to an anonymous function. For simple small functions here and there it may not matter, but if the entire call stack in a debugger is full of anonymous functions then it could be a problem.
function add(a: i32, b: i32): i32 {
return a + b;
}
Than the example you provided and it is approximately the same length. I used to arrow functions everywhere in TS/JS and it made it difficult to read IME, and there was zero benefit. They are find for things like event handlers, promises chains etc. But I'd rather just use function when I don't have to worry about the value of this.
You're assuming that named lambda is the same thing as a function, which often isn't true. Unless you mean that `=>` should be ambiguous depending on scope (lambda inside a function, a function in global scope)? That would also be a bit problematic, wouldn't it?
in the end it's all bits in ram that a cpu has to execute. as long as the cpu ISA is build around common coding patterns found in c there seems no reason to use anything other than c. I get it that people do not like to code in a language that does not hold your hand. I myself prototype most of my code in c#. But in the end it has to fit inside the cpu ISA architecture.
I think this page describes "what" but not "why" of Carbon.
Carbon exists so that it's possible to migrate a large C++ code base, like Chrome, from C++ to something saner, incrementally.
The most important attribute of Carbon is not the specifics of the syntax but the fact that it's designed to be used in a mixed C++ / Carbon code base and comes with tooling to convert as much of C++ as possible to Carbon.
That's what makes Carbon different from any other language: D, Zig, Nim, Rust etc.
It's not possible to port a millions line C++ code base, like Chrome, to another language so large C++ projects are stuck with objectively pretty bad language and are forced to continue to use C++ even though a better language might exist.
That's why Carbon is designed for incremental adoption in large C++ projects: you can add Carbon code to existing C++ code and incrementally port C++ over to Carbon until only Carbon code exists.
Still a very large investment but at least possible and not dissimilar to refactoring to adopt newer C++ features like e.g. replacing use of std::string with std::string_view.
That's why it's a rational project for Google. Even though it's a large investment, it might pay off if they can write new software in Carbon instead of C++ and refactor old code into Carbon.
Not to disagree, but to amplify - FWIW, most of what you say was also the sales pitch for C++ over ANSI C in the early 90s vs. the "pure Java" mentality that shortly followed in the late 90s (with a megaton of Sun Microsystems marketing to re-write almost everything rather than bridge with JNI). People neglect how practical incrementalism can be.
Also, FWIW, it is very ergonomic for Nim to call C (though the reverse is made complex by GC'd types). { I believe similar can be said for other PLangs you mention, but I am not as sure. } It's barely an inconvenience. Parts of Nim's stdlib still use libc and many PLangs do that for at least system calls. You can also just convert C to Nim with the c2nim program, though usually that requires a lot of hand editing afterwards.
Maybe they should write a C++2carbon translator tool? That would speed things up for them. Maybe they already have and I just haven't heard of it? I mean the article does say "some level of source-to-source translation", but I couldn't find details/caveats poking around for a few minutes.
Nim 2 doesn’t require gc, with arc/atomicArc. The only thing you really need to be careful about is when you use ref types or custom owning types. Otherwise, manual memory management can be done in Nim pretty easily.
Hypothetically you could importcpp fns, classes, etc when compiling with nim cpp
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Source-to-source translation is definitely planned. We've even done some early experiments.
But we need to get the language and interop into good shape to be able to thoroughly test and evaluate the migration.
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fwiw, many PLs find themselves needing to have C FFI if they want to support MacOS. It's not just a convenience thing.
But couldn’t one argue that’s true of most languages, they promise incremental progress toward rewriting your behemoth into miniature monoliths? I think the only one where they clearly drew the line at being able to pull in headers is .Net. You just can’t do it. Others like Golang or rust, you can point to the C headers and bam…
Honestly, while I find the syntax terse, I welcome more low level languages able to push performance.
These are strong points and I think the methodology behind Carbon is the correct one. The elephant in the room is that once Google decide to drop Carbon my existing code base will be dependant on a dead technology and then I am screwed.
I find it hard to trust Google to maintain any software nor to write software that is maintainable by a community. They write software for themselves and themselves alone.
Then wait for Google to adopt it at large?
If it (purportedly?) exists so that Google can move multi-million line code bases from C++ to something better bit-by-bit, because it's otherwise infeasible to do so, why would Google drop it after they have ported the first million?
You can simply wait to see if Chrome adopts it.
For me Go is a success story.
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I don’t think this is the only reason.
You could do this with Nim, Nim 2’s ARC model is compatible with c++’s RAII. Nim supports moves, destructors, copies, etc. see https://nim-lang.org/docs/destructors.html
You can import C++ classes, member functions, free functions, etc. easily with importcpp
importcpp for the code you are incrementally porting over. You could write a libclang script to do this for you. Exportcpp for what you any code that have been ported but have dependencies in C++ land.
My best guess is they want C++ compatibility and a new language due to preferences, more control over the compiler, etc. which are all valid reasons
> I think this page describes "what" but not "why" of Carbon.
Maybe the page was updated recently, but there is a "why" link near the top:
https://docs.carbon-lang.dev/#why-build-carbon
What I would like to see is more documentation on the "why not" that summarizes why other languages and proposals are not sufficient. For example, Safe C++ proposal[1] appears to satisfy all requirements, but I can't find any reference to it.
[1] https://safecpp.org/draft.html
The reason the Safe C++ proposal wasn't mentioned is that it came years later. =] I'll see if it makes sense for us to update that section a bit, this probably isn't the only thing that we should refresh a bit to reflect the last few years of developments.
FWIW, the biggest challenge with Safe C++ is that WG21 rejected[1] that direction. And it was developed without building a governance model or way to evolve outside of WG21, and so doesn't seem to have a credible path forward.
[1]: FWIW, some members of WG21 don't agree with this characterizationp, but both the author's impression and the practical effect was to reject the direction.
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Did Safe C++ ever have a full, correct, fully compliant, reference implementation, or was there only (closed-source) Circle as some kind of reference implementation? Circle, as far as I know, is closed-source.
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The real "why" is because, unlike other languages, Google can't strong-arm or bribe C++'s ISO committee into doing its bidding, and that has caused problems for Google in the past. Carbon is a language born out of a corporate hissy fit.
Depends on how much people one sends to WG21 voting sessions, some folks at Reddit would assert contracts only got into C++26, thanks to Bloomberg votes.
> That's what makes Carbon different from any other language: D, Zig, Nim, Rust etc.
I know you can compile C++ files to object files, pass them to the D compiler, and have them call eachothers' functions. I've never tried it though.
--------
g++ -c foo.cpp
dmd bar.d foo.o -L-lstdc++
--------
https://dlang.org/spec/cpp_interface.html
It's a great feature, and D has a bunch of support for this kind of thing.
But D and C++ have just enough differences to make extern(C++) not be automatic. It can take some pretty arcane metaprogramming to get things to work, and some things are impossible.
It's also worth pointing out that D isn't trying to be fully compatible with C++.
A similar example is Facebook/Meta inventing Hack to progressively replacing the old PHP code.
Although it was a journey, starting with HipHop and other tools before arriving there.
In which way is C++ an "objectively pretty bad language"?
I have done C++ for a living and it is not the easiest but there is tooling and warnings as errors that catch a lot of the errors before even you make a mistake.
It is true that packaging is more challenging but it is also true that it is very configurable ro squeeze performance as much as possible (which is on of C++'s niches). And by squeezing I mean beyond setting a release build. You could for example decide to go with LTO + PGO + remove position independent code and do static linking for all dependencies, for example.
You can do virtually anything that no other language can do and whwn you need it, believe me it is useful.
But you can still code every day code wirh your lambdas, ranges, smart pointers and virtual interfaces.
I understand C++ has some baggage but is is very far from being an "objectively bad language" in ly opinion. More so if you take into account its performance and library availability, which is second to none for almost any task, except maybe for the typical enterprise-like Java app or web stuff, byt niw C++26 will include reflection and annotations, so this could be a game changer.
Explicitly and between the lines, Carruth and Google have made it clear that the “bad” part of C++ from their perspective is the standards committee.
In particular, the committee’s unwillingness to make ABI-breaking changes to the language, or more abstractly, to consider the needs of organizations with huge active code bases at least as seriously as those with huge legacy code bases.
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> Carbon exists so that it's possible to migrate a large C++ code base, like Chrome, from C++ to something saner, incrementally.
_Incrementally_: a C++ project can be incrementally made more sane also using constructs to avoid and constructs to use once the problem domain is confined. In my past, I had successfully implemented this quest for 3 different fairly large C++ projects. This is not a strong selling point for carbon.
Once you've done this work though, what stops the codebase from slowly drifting back into the less sane realm it previously resided in? It seems pretty reasonable to be concerned that a company that produced a messy codebase once is capable of making it messy again, and given that turnover is inevitable in the long term (which is the timeframe that seems relevant given that long-term compatibility in C++ codebases is kind of the whole reason this discussion is happening), it doesn't seem like relying on an individual to enforce the rules is super viable. The obvious way to enforce this sort of thing is through tooling, and there's no tool more powerful than literally making it impossible to express the undesirable code in the language itself in the first place.
You're right that incrementally rewriting isn't much of an advantage over C++ itself, but I think you're missing the point that the emphasis on "incremental" is to highlight the advantage in rewriting C++ code in Carbon over alternatives that don't provide as much compatibility (with Rust being somewhat notorious for being suggested by outside parties as a target for rewriting in whenever discussions about C++ codebases happen). The argument for Carbon over C++ isn't specifically that it can be rewritten incrementally, but that it's just a better language, which has benefits _after_ the rewrite. To be clear, I'm sure that someone could come up with reasonable objections to that claim as well, but I think it's distinct from the part you're objecting to, and it's worth treating as a separate concern.
Assuming the right culture, which unfortunately many C++ shops lack, that is why we have things like Orthodox C++ and similar movements.
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That seems like a really neat idea.
One other use case I could think of is gaming, where there is an incredible amount of load-bearing C++ code that's never realistically going to be rewritten, and strict memory safety is not necessarily a sine qua non in the way it is in other fields.
Depends on the kind of game, and lack of security is how piracy thrives.
Yeah, perhaps the GitHub README [1] had been better ... but it seemed like the most "official" page.
[1] https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/?tab=readme-o...
> It's not possible to port a millions line C++ code base, like Chrome, to another language so large C++ projects are stuck with objectively pretty bad language and are forced to continue to use C++ even though a better language might exist.
One good aspect about C++ is its backwards compatibility or stability. Also a drawback, but companies not having to spend huge amounts of time, expertise and money rewriting their whole codebases all the time is something they appreciate.
Rust is often somewhat stable, but not always.
https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/type-inference-breakage-in...
https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/127343
300 comments on Github.
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/332176
Rust has editions, but it's a feature that it will probably take years to really be able to evaluate.
What kind of compatibility story will Carbon have? What features does it have to support compatibility?
> Rust is often somewhat stable, but not always.
> https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/type-inference-breakage-in...
> https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/127343
> 300 comments on Github.
> https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/332176
Might worth noting that this change technically doesn't violate Rust's stability guarantees since type inference changes and/or adding new impls are exempt. Of course, that doesn't really help with the question of whether this change should have been made in the given timeframe (as opposed to the socket struct change IIRC?), but that ship has long sailed.
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I can write C++98 or C++11 code that will fail in a C++23 compiler, because C++ also isn't 100% backwards compatible.
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Zig is designed to interoperate like this with C, and Kotlin with Java.
...and Swift w/ Obj-C
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If you've seen this before, it's worth looking at the 2025 roadmap – it's long-term work, a full safety story hasn't been quite figured out (TBD end 2025), and 0.1 is TBD end 2026. About the pace of Rust, although without the active forum that Rust had in its early days.
https://docs.carbon-lang.dev/docs/project/roadmap.html
What _is_ interesting is that I get the impression that Carbon is being workshopped with the C++ community, rather than the wider PLT community -- I worry that they won't benefit from the broader perspectives that'll help it avoid well-known warts elsewhere.
> What _is_ interesting is that I get the impression that Carbon is being workshopped with the C++ community, rather than the wider PLT community -- I worry that they won't benefit from the broader perspectives that'll help it avoid well-known warts elsewhere.
FWIW, we're working hard whenever looking at an aspect of the language to look at other languages beyond C++ and learn any and everything we can from them. Lots of our design proposals cite Swift, Rust, Go, TypeScript, Python, Kotlin, C#, Java, and even Scala.
Make sure you're checking out Hylo. I'm not sure that its ideas are right for Carbon, but if you're looking for a credible alternative to Rust's take on safety, I think it's one of the better ones.
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Chandler I would love to be involved in Carbon development to shape its development to be usable at my company or alternatively to use it in my own projects. What is the best way to stay involved in Carbon development? Just the discord?
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Main goal for Carbon is to port existing code first, general purpose second, with Google internal teams as main customer.
If it ever goes beyond that remains to be seen.
The Carbon team is the first to point out that anyone doing green field development should reach out to Rust or any managed language that fits the project scope.
> being workshopped with the C++ community
Honestly seems like a dubious idea. The C++ community that remains are even more "just get good" than before. They still think UB all over the place is fine.
I think that might be true of the language committee, but there's presumably a huge crowd of people with existing c++ code bases that would like to have a different path forward than just hoping that the committee changes priorities.
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I'd say the C++ community is torn.
Some part of it want C++ to be Rust, with a focus on compile-time safety. Others take "C++" literally as "C with extra stuff" and value performance over safety.
Companies like Google are likely to be in the former camp, as for what they are doing, security is critical. Unsurprisingly, Carbon is a Google project.
Video game companies on the other hand are likely to be in the latter camp. Most of the times, security is not as critical, especially for offline games, and memory corruption usually don't go further than a game crash. Tight memory management however is critical, and it often involves raw pointers and custom allocation schemes.
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Carbon is just trying to bring a rust-like edition to cpp, there's no reason for non cpp users to Carbon.
I think there are parallels with functional languages on the JVM. The parts that are the worst are the parts that were built for maximum interoperability. Not to mention that the JVM forces classes on you at the deepest opcode levels.
Compatibility with C++ is fine, but so far it seems carbon's safety story is entirely a wishlist rather than anything yet. Seems like Carbon might be a more of a place to demonstrate features for C++ committees than a real language?
Personally I have hand it up to here with lousy programmingn languages that make it easy for me to write bugs.
Related. Others?
Carbon is not a programming language (sort of) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4676789 - Oct 2012 (39 comments)
"Longer term, we will build on this to introduce a safe Carbon subset. This will be a large and complex undertaking, and won’t be in the 0.1 design."
If they can't get safety right at the design stage, they'll never get it right. We already have D and Zig in this space.
Zig is nowhere near memory safe. Even some basic semantics (passing arguments as values or references) are horribly broken. https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/5973
no need for memory safety to be in the language. It can still be checked at compile-time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY_Z-aGbYm8
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Given that Carbon's space is "languages with full interoperability with C++," I don't think D and Zig are in that space.
As to "getting it right" - things are not so simple. The emphasis on memory-safety soundness is based on some empirical hypotheses, some better founded than others, and it's unclear what "getting it right" means.
From a software correctness perspective, the road to sound memory safety is as follows: 1. We want to reduce the amount of costly bugs in software as cheaply as possible, 2. Memory unsafe operations are a common cause of many costly bugs, 3. Some or all memory bugs can be eliminated cheaply with sound language guarantees.
The problem is that 1. memory safety refers to several properties that don't all contribute equally to correctness (e.g. out-of-bounds access causes more serious bugs than use-after-free [1]), and 2. soundly guaranteeing different memory safety properties has different costs. It gets more complicated than that (e.g. there are also unsound techniques that have proven very effective to consider), but that's the overview.
It is, therefore, as of yet unclear which memory safety properties are worth it to soundly guarantee in the language, and the answer may depend on the language's other goals (and there must be other goals that are at least as important, because the empty language guarantees not only all memory safety properties but all (safety [2]) correctness properties, yet nobody uses it as it's useless, while a language like ATS can be used to write many useful programs, but few use it because it's just too costly to use well). The goal is always to find the right balance.
For example, Java soundly guarantees lack of use-after-free at the cost of increased memory footprint; that may be "getting it right" for some programs but not all. Rust soundly guarantees lack of use-after-free at the cost of imposing strong and elaborate typesystem constraints (that, as is often the case, are more constraining than the property they guarantee); that, too, may be "getting it right" for some programs, though not all. Zig guarantees lack of out-of-bounds access in a simple language at the cost of not guaranteeing lack of use-after-free, and that may also be "getting it right" for some programs but not all.
So what "getting it right" means always depends on constraints other than safety (Rust and Zig want to consume less memory than Java; Java and Zig want to be simpler than Rust; Java and Rust want to guarantee more memory safety properties than Zig). If Carbon wants to be more interoperable with C++ than Java, Rust, or Zig, then it will have to figure out what "getting it right" means for Carbon.
[1]: https://cwe.mitre.org/top25/archive/2024/2024_cwe_top25.html
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_and_liveness_properties
> As to "getting it right" - things are not so simple. The emphasis on memory-safety soundness is based on some empirical hypotheses, some better founded than others, and it's unclear what "getting it right" means.
It means eliminating undefined behavior, and unplanned interaction between distant parts of the program.
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Splendid reply! I'm a big fan of Carbon and so I really appreciate when people make solid arguments for its tradeoff space.
I counted the word “sound” in this reply 8 times. When I the word sound there is always the word Rust nearby. It is just a coincidence, of course.
Swift seems to be doing a decent job of this (and C++ interop for that matter)
> Swift seems to be doing a decent job of this
It keeps adding keywords and it has become way harder to keep it in your head. It’s over 220 at this point. Don’t take my word for it, Swift creator doesn’t agree with its current direction either.
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I remember back when carbon first appeared, I immediately thought it's not gonna get popular simply because it has "fn" and "var"
superficial details matter - people that stayed on C++ instead of transitioning to flashy new ones have type-before-name as part of programming identity
you can have all the features in the world (and be recognized by it), but if the code doesn't _look_ like C++, then it's of no interest
Well, the Carbon team primarily focusses on one customer: Google. If management decides "it's carbon now" then a few thousand developers will write carbon or change jobs. If they are then somewhat successful inside Google, people leaving will spread it.
I don't think it will reach the same distribution as other languages, as the niche is "large C++ projects, which want to transition to something else without rewrite" for anybody else there are a huge number of alternatives.
Stockholm syndrome, after learning C++ syntax, surely it wasn't all for nothing, I can't accept that.
One could presumably compile arbitrary C++ to rust or D without changing semantics, then slowly go through the result making it look more native to the new language.
That would either be a wholesale conversion or emitting a translation shim style thing at the boundary between legacy c++ and the new language.
I'm not sure Carbon is necessary to achieve such a conversion.
I would be stunned if you could compile arbitrary c++ to rust or d, unless by "compile" you mean "painfully hand-translate and spend months fixing subtle errors". you are underestimating the sheer complexity of the language.
Agreed, but it would be much worse than you suggest. Many meaty C++ projects have an underlying architecture that could not even be expressed in (safe) Rust. The idea of transpiling a major C++ project and getting it running in Rust with only some minimal idiom fiddling seems utterly fantastical.
Implementation would be by modifying clang. Traverse the clang ast emitting the new language instead of llvm IR.
You wouldn't get idiomatic code out but with some effort you'd get rust/d/c/other which clang compiles to the same IR as the original.
How much refactoring is warranted afterwards would depend on how much effort you put in to recreating templates / header files / modules etc on the fly.
I'm not sure I'd choose to do this myself if I was in Google's position but it would be tempting.
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This was essentially how DMD (the reference D compiler) was translated to D. However this was mostly a restricted subset of C++ common to both of them, e.g. no diamond inheritance, no operator overloading whackiness.
Nim would be the best choice for this at the moment, imho
importcpp what you need. exportcpp for the other way around
It's strange that they sometimes use [] to specify a type, other times they use (). That doesn't look very consistent to me.
I like the use of [] though, it reminds me of Scala, which I liked before they did the scala 3 fork.
[] here can be read as similar to <> in Rust, C#, Java, or C++ templates (but move the content after the `template` into the function declaration). It's not weird if you're familiar with generic programming (and C++ programmers, the target audience of Carbon right now, will all be familiar with it, they use it with their STL algorithms and collections if nothing else). The () is the ordinary "here is the parameter list" used in pretty much every C-syntax language. C doesn't have generics, so there are several ways people have extended that base C-ish syntax to support generics: <>, [], template<>, and a few others have all been done in the past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_programming - Worth studying up on if you're unfamiliar with it.
`fn partition[T: ...]` uses `[]` to define T. `s: Slice(T)` uses `(T)` to invoke the type constructor `Slice` with the type argument T. So you could say that's fine because these are different operations.
But then defining a type constructor itself still uses `()`, like `class UnsafeAllowDelete(T:! Concrete) { ... }`. It does seem somewhat inconsistent.
How is it inconsistent? The square brackets always mean "this was deduced" and the parens always indicate "this was passed in explicitly"
Square brackets do not indicate "this is a type". Instead they indicate "these things were deduced from their context"
I remember back when Rust was still in so much flux that there were regular discussions about syntax, and there was a proposal very similar to the syntax of carbon: square brackets for generics and type annotations, parens for indexing, etc. It was basically turned down because they wanted to win over C++ devs. I still wish it was the favored outcome...it looks so much cleaner and less jarring.
Nah, IMO they're both pretty suboptimal, and if Rust is going to choose between two bad options, it might as well choose the overwhelmingly familiar option. (Sadly, my strong opinions on what type parameter and indexing syntax should look like are too large for this margin to contain.)
The joke is that no* c++ dev actually likes the bracket syntax for templates.
* I might be slightly exaggerating.
How is it different from mere syntactic sugar over the same programming concepts? What does it bring that C++ cannot do?
Isn't it just a way of controlling the language vs using normative bodies?
Zig seems like a better approach but I still remember the carbon C killer video from fireship before that channel was bought by vc funding and turned into AI slop news reporter most likely using AI.
I don't even watch fireship anymore. I actively resist the urge to. There are some other better channels like typecraft or primagen or dreams of code and so many other enthusiasts, there is this one bash guy that I watch whose having fun in life doing side quests like going to gym and gardening and I am all for that too.
Given the huge effort to make this language, I wonder if they could have directed that toward some kind of Rust-to-C++ bridge instead?
I think they had another such effort for a while here: https://github.com/google/crubit
Are all major programming languages going to come from corporations in web 2.0?
Where do you think even C and C++ came from?
Web 2.0?
Probably referring to "large tech companies that grew in the Web 2.0".
Yeah, agree that it sounds slightly off initially.
What's the pro of not having a stable ABI?
Being able to change things. It's like all downsides of backwards compatibility but on a binary level
As to things ABI prevents:
- scoped_lock was added to not break ABI by modifying lock_guard
- int128_t has never been standardized because modifying intmax_t is an ABI break. Although if you ask me, intmax_t should just be deprecated.
- unique_ptr could fit in register with language modifications, which would be needed to make it zero-overhead, compared to a pointer
- Many changes to error_code were rejected because they would break ABI
- status_code raised ABI concerns
- A proposal to add a filter to recursive_directory_iterator was rejected because it was an ABI break
- A proposal to make most of <cstring> constexpr (including strlen) will probably die because it would be an ABI break.
- Adding UTF-8 support to regex is an ABI break
- Adding support for realloc or returning the allocated size is an ABI break for polymorphic allocators
- Making destructors implicitly virtual in polymorphic classes
- Return type of push_back could be improved with an ABI break
- Improving shared_ptr would be an ABI break
- [[no_unique_address]] could be inferred by the compiler should we not care at all about ABI
Source: https://cor3ntin.github.io/posts/abi/
> Making destructors implicitly virtual in polymorphic classes
Not sure what to think of this one. Either one introduces a new keyword to opt out (not great), or all public destructors of an abstract base class are implicitly marked virtual (not great and another "hidden" language feature like threadsafe-statics).
After all, an abstract base class does not need its destructor to be public.
This language changes too much and too little all at the same time. It creates a burden on the developers without lifting many of the burdens of C++.
I can imagine the thought process behind the designers of the language went as follows:
"It's not possible to improve C++ without breaking backwards compatibility"
"That's correct, but if we're going to break backwards compatibility anyways, why not use this as an opportunity to change a bunch of things?"
aka the python 3 mentality, where necessary changes were combined with unnecessary changes that caused pointless migration costs. The fallacy is derived from the fact that breaking backwards compatibility is considered a massive fixed cost due to the fact that libraries have to be updated, therefore adding small incremental costs will not meaningfully increase overall cost. In reality the fixed cost of breaking backwards compatibility can be reduced massively if the proper care is taken, which means all the "just because" changes that were thrown in as a bonus, end up representing a much larger share of the migration cost than initially anticipated.
Chandler Carruth and his Carbon team might be both incompetent and dishonest. Is he and his team just scamming Google while working effectively without accountability, racking in money? How have they not gotten further? Why does the language seem so incompetently and carelessly designed? Do they put any effort or thought into it?
[2022]
It's an ongoing project, specifying a date here wouldn't make much sense.
is there any news? the website has no information and doesn't really highlight anything other than their launch at a conference in 2022.
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It's become a pet peeve of mine, but for the love of God, if anyone with input in Carbon is scanning this, what can be done to use "func" instead of "fn" as a keyword?
That all-consonant keyword always makes it seem like I'm reading Hungarian notation when reading Rust for instance. An other options I've seen for instance in Pony, "fun", is already an English word with a completely different meaning.
Even the "function" from Javascript seems fine to me.
What's wrong with fn? It's perfectly understandable. I don't understand what the bikeshedding about keywords like this is about.
I don't even code in kotlin but I know that kotlin has function as fun :P
Such small things as using __ __ in python and small inconveniences (lua's 1 instead of 0) really has a lot of people, what do I say.. yea, polarized on this matter.
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Keywords usually are quite pronounceable, and some of them are even proper words. How do you read fn?
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I use emacs' prettify-symbol mode to turn every language's function keyword into ʩ. Don't think I incurred in God's wrath just yet.
Why not just write it as fun, that way you are having fun while writing a function just as (God intended,[pun intended]) :P
I kind of appreciate fn, personally. It's nice having function declaration lines with two less unnecessary characters in their length.
How about "proc"? Too different? I don't like fn either but function is too much. Fun and func aren't great either. I'd go with proc or fn.
fun, press tab, modern IDE fills in the remaing function characters.
Unfortunately we keep designing languages for people using notepad.
Nowadays my editor even writes full blocks at a time.
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Probs too archaic?
"func" is fine; "function" is too long. "fn" is also good, but for example, Go was designed with "func," and it's one of the most successful, readable languages in the world, so why not?
C++ does not have a function keyword at all, I wonder why did they add it in the first place.
The c++ notation for functions (and types in general) is horrible, and makes parsing much more expensive than it needs to be. Fixing it is step one if you are making a modern language.
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To avoid any possibility of reintroducing the Most Vexing Parse?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_vexing_parse
It doesn't, but you can pretend it does:
They probably want to use the same arrow signature and need something in place of auto as omitting it completely would complicate parsing.
F# uses “fun” and I like it. The vowel does help a bit and I never confuse it with the English word. The worst one IMHO is Haskell’s “\”.
Since interop is such a big design goal I wonder if fn was chosen after analyzing the impact of alternative keywords present in large c++ code based that would impact interop in a negative way (eg requiring more escaping).
I like it the most when there's no keyword. Just name() and return type.
Pony's keywords are the best. "fun" and "be" are just, well, fun lol.
I agree, I hate fn. Also not a fan of func though.
In C++ you can use indifferently either the class or typename keyword to introduce template arguments (because of course you can). A lot of styleguides suggest using typename because class is slightly misleading (the type could be anything not just a class).
In practice everybody just uses class, because who as the time to type the full keyword and signature declarations in C++ are already unwieldy as it is.
Anyone using a proper IDE instead of notepad like editor.
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Tbh, I wonder why modern languages still have a function keyword at all, e.g.:
...or any variation of the arrow-function idea...
It's the other way around. Modern languages and grammars use explicit leading keywords to clearly indicate what sort of context they're about to parse, rather than blindly forging ahead in a superposition while waiting for some future sequence of tokens to clarify what the context is.
It's hard for a naive parser (one-token lookahead, for example), to tell after parsing `const add = (` if this defines a function or a variable.
A "function" keyword often exists just to help the parser. C3, for example, to simply the parser of its language that's a superset of C, adds a "fn" keyword for this very purpose of disambiguation.
That looks like a variable that points to an anonymous function. For simple small functions here and there it may not matter, but if the entire call stack in a debugger is full of anonymous functions then it could be a problem.
IMO it is far easier to read this:
Than the example you provided and it is approximately the same length. I used to arrow functions everywhere in TS/JS and it made it difficult to read IME, and there was zero benefit. They are find for things like event handlers, promises chains etc. But I'd rather just use function when I don't have to worry about the value of this.
You're assuming that named lambda is the same thing as a function, which often isn't true. Unless you mean that `=>` should be ambiguous depending on scope (lambda inside a function, a function in global scope)? That would also be a bit problematic, wouldn't it?
Wow the syntax looks terrible.
in the end it's all bits in ram that a cpu has to execute. as long as the cpu ISA is build around common coding patterns found in c there seems no reason to use anything other than c. I get it that people do not like to code in a language that does not hold your hand. I myself prototype most of my code in c#. But in the end it has to fit inside the cpu ISA architecture.