Comment by m-schuetz

14 hours ago

The idea is great, the execution is terrible. In JS, modules were instantly popular because they were easy to use, added a lot of benefit, and support in browsers and the ecoysystem was fairly good after a couple of years. In C++, support is still bad, 6 years after they were introduced.

The idea is great in the same way the idea of a perpetual motion machine is great: I'd love to have a perpetual motion machine (or C++ modules), but it's just not realistic.

IMO, the modules standard should have aimed to only support headers with no inline code (including no templates). That would be a severe limitation, but at least maybe it might have solved the problem posed by protobuf soup (AFAIK the original motivation for modules) and had a chance of being a real thing.

Exactly. C++ is still waiting for its "uv" moment, so until then modules aren't even close to solved.

  • And uv required some ground work, where the PEP process streamlined how you define a python project, and then uv could be built on top.