Comment by kajaktum
15 hours ago
C++ needs to give itself up and make way for other, newer, modern, language that have far, far fewer baggage. It should be working with other language to provide tools for interop and migration.
C++ will never, ever be modern and comprehensible because of 1 and 1 reason alone: backward compatibility.
It does not matter what version of C++ you are using, you are still using C with classes.
Why should C++ stop improving? Other languages don't need C++ to die to beat it.
Half-serious reason: because with each C++ version, we seem to get less and less what we want and more and more inefficiency. In terms of language design and compiler implementation. Are we even at feature-completeness for C++20 on major compilers yet? (In an actually usable bug-free way, not an on-paper "completion".)
gcc seems to have full C++20, almost everything in 23 and and implemented reflection for 26 which is probably the only thing anyone cares about in 26.
https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support.html
Funny how gcc seems to be the top dog now, what happened to clang? Thought their codebase was supposed to be easier and more pleasant to work with? Or maybe just more hardcore compiler devs work on gcc?
The compiler design is definitely becoming more complicated but the language design has become progressively more efficient and nicer to use. I’ve been using C++20 for a long time in production; it has been problem-free for years at this point. It is not strictly complete, e.g. modules still aren’t usable, but you don’t need to wait for that to use it.
Even C++23 is largely usable at this point, though there are still gaps for some features.
C++ isn't great but so far I haven't seen anything I'd rather use.
Some other language need to step up and rewrite/replace LLVM then, because no language that relies on a ~30 million loc backend written in C++ can ever hope to replace it.
C with classes is a very simplistic view of C++.
I for one can write C++ but I cannot write a single program in C. If the overlap was so vast, I would be able to write good C but I cannot.
I've done things with templates to express my ideas in C++ that I cannot do in other languages, and the behaviour of deterministic destructors is what sets it apart from C. It is comprehensible and readable to me.
I would argue that C++ is modern, since it is in use today. Perhaps your definition of "modern" is too narrow?
I mean the Carbon project exists