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Comment by nxobject

3 days ago

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.

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nxobject

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chandlerc1024  2 days ago

> 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.

pjmlp  3 days ago

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.

IshKebab  3 days ago

> 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.

  • bla3  3 days ago

    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.

    • pjmlp  3 days ago

      That is what many of us have done moving into managed languages, with native libraries when required to do so.

      The remaining people driving where the language goes have other priorities in mind like reflection.

      The profiles that were supposed to be so much better than the Safe C++ proposal, none of them made it into C++26, and it remains to be seen if we ever will see a sensible preview implementation for C++29.

      8 replies →

  • GuB-42  2 days ago

    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.

    • JonChesterfield  2 days ago

      I blame the "we won't recompile anything ever" stance from the financial organisations for the breakdown. It means C++ cannot fix mistakes, even when they harm performance, under the general name of "abi stability".

      Thus there is an opening for a faster language. And still for a safer one. And for an easier one to use. So all C++ has going for it is inertia. It's moribund unless the committee reconsider their stance on intentionally losing the performance competition.

      7 replies →

wocram  3 days ago

Carbon is just trying to bring a rust-like edition to cpp, there's no reason for non cpp users to Carbon.

ryanobjc  3 days ago

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.