Bernie
Bjarne Stroustrup on delivering safe C++:
"First of all, we have to get people who are not up-to-date on C++ become up-to-date".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8UvQKvOSSw&list=PLHTh1InhhwT7gQEuYznhhvAYTel0qzl72&index=1
#programming #cpp #cppcon2023
Bernie
@uhrmann Sure, anyone who is starting a new project today would be better served by #Rust than C++23.
But Stroustrup is addressing the context of a large existing codebase. He claims that considerable gains are possible by simply adopting modern C++ and enforcing "safety profiles" with static analyzers.
To which, I don't disagree: I see horrifying C++ code every day at work, and more being added to the pile.
Johann Uhrmann
@codewiz my gut feeling is that it's easier for "people who are not up-to-date on C++" to learn a new, inherently safe language than to "become up-to-date" on C++.
Bernie
@nuncio That's in the eye of the beholder: I find modern C++ much more readable than old-school C/C++ with void* and casts everywhere.
And by "readable", I actually mean: being able to verify that it works correctly, without leaking resources, stepping off the bounds of arrays, using uninitialized objects, etc.
Nuncio Bitis ✷ ✅
@codewiz In other words: "We need to obfuscate all our previous code to be able to keep our jobs"
Nuncio Bitis ✷ ✅
@codewiz Wait until you have to maintain someone else's code that has no type specifications and classes that inherit off each other in circular fashion.
Bernie
@nuncio That's *always* the case when you work on a large codebase: no human can write one million lines of code on their own, and established projects such as Chrome, Firefox, Android, Linux and GCC are multiple millions of lines written by thousands of people over decades.
Bernie
A few months ago, I tried fixing a bug in one of GCC's optimization passes.
GCC was originally written in C and is now compiled in C++ mode, but mostly remains a C-style codebase.
I understand the bug and I have some idea of what should be done to fix it, but all my attempts failed with crashes or ICEs 😞
Bernie
With GCC's old-school coding style, it's very easy to call a function with the wrong type of node. My code compiles just fine, but crashes at runtime with my testcase.
I haven't tried, but my change would likely pass the entire GCC testsuite with thousands of tests.
Morale: to speed up software development and eliminate entire classes of bugs, we need abstractions that can be verified at compile-time. Modern C++ incorporates some of these ideas, and Rust is built entirely around them.
Bernie
@veer66 How about Cpp2? 😏
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8U3hl8XMm8c&list=PLHTh1InhhwT7gQEuYznhhvAYTel0qzl72&index=4
Herb Sutter is the chair of the ISO C++ committee, and author of a few books on C++ which I read long ago...
...and he wants to redesign C++ around safety and simplicity. Yes. Unlike previous failed attempts, he actually seems to know how to make this succeed.
veer66
@codewiz Why not give a new name to the new language, such as C+++, instead of bumping the version?
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