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The Future of C++ As Seen By Its Creator

Posted by Zonk on Mon Aug 13, 2007 06:01 AM
from the fun-name-to-say dept.
holden writes "In a rare public talk, C++ creator Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup discusses his ideal in programming languages, as well how he sees the next version (and beyond) of C++ developing. He explains the general selection criteria used for adding new features, some of the legacy of C++, and many other interesting topics. Especially interesting is during the Q&A he explains his views of the embrace and extend mentality some implementations, such as VC++, have taken."

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  • uh... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cosmocain (1060326) on Monday August 13, @06:06AM (#20210265)
    ...transcript, anyone? i hate watching or listening to vids at work.
    • Re:uh... (Score:4, Funny)

      by neonmonk (467567) on Monday August 13, @06:08AM (#20210279)
      Agreed. I don't see the point in video unless they're actually showing up some fancy technology. ...Or, alternatively, they've got really nice jugs.
      [ Parent ]
      • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
    • Re:uh... (Score:5, Funny)

      by LiquidCoooled (634315) on Monday August 13, @06:11AM (#20210299)
      Good afternoon everybody, I would like to start by including iostream.h into the discussion.

      After this we can get onto the main proceedings which might or might not return anything.

      We move to the future by emitting a string of "Hello world" before returning zero.

      This is the end of the discussion I hope it was informative.
      [ Parent ]
    • Mod Parent Insightful (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dreamchaser (49529) on Monday August 13, @06:15AM (#20210323)
      (http://127.0.0.1/ | Last Journal: Saturday August 04, @07:40AM)
      Video or audio just for the sake of being flashy is a dumb idea and I usually won't watch or listen. If I want audio and video I'll devote my full attention to my TV feed. Otherwise when I'm accessing information on the Internet I want text. I can read it far faster than someone speaks on a video interview for one thing, and for another text lends itself far better to (human)multitasking than video or audio does.
      [ Parent ]
    • Re:uh... by jrumney (Score:2) Monday August 13, @06:23AM
      • Re:uh... by pigscanfly.ca (Score:2) Monday August 13, @06:25AM
        • Re:uh... by tepples (Score:1) Monday August 13, @08:18AM
          • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
        • Re:uh... by kestasjk (Score:2) Monday August 13, @09:34AM
    • scratch that itch by CarpetShark (Score:2) Monday August 13, @06:40AM
    • Re:uh... (Score:5, Funny)

      Here ya go, buddy.

      Interviewer: Well, it's been a few years since you changed the world of software design, how does it feel, looking back?

      Stroustrup: Actually, I was thinking about those days, just before you arrived. Do you remember? Everyone was writing 'C' and, the trouble was, they were pretty damn good at it. Universities got pretty good at teaching it, too. They were turning out competent - I stress the word 'competent' - graduates at a phenomenal rate. That's what caused the problem.

      Interviewer: Problem?

      Stroustrup: Yes, problem. Remember when everyone wrote Cobol?

      Interviewer: Of course, I did too

      Stroustrup: Well, in the beginning, these guys were like demi-gods. Their salaries were high, and they were treated like royalty.

      Interviewer: Those were the days, eh?

      Stroustrup: Right. So what happened? IBM got sick of it, and invested millions in training programmers, till they were a dime a dozen.

      Interviewer: That's why I got out. Salaries dropped within a year, to the point where being a journalist actually paid better.

      Stroustrup: Exactly. Well, the same happened with 'C' programmers.

      Interviewer: I see, but what's the point?

      Stroustrup: Well, one day, when I was sitting in my office, I thought of this little scheme, which would redress the balance a little. I thought 'I wonder what would happen, if there were a language so complicated, so difficult to learn, that nobody would ever be able to swamp the market with programmers? Actually, I got some of the ideas from X10, you know, X windows. That was such a bitch of a graphics system, that it only just ran on those Sun 3/60 things. They had all the ingredients for what I wanted. A really diculously complex syntax, obscure functions, and pseudo-OO structure. Even now, nobody writes raw X-windows code. Motif is the only way to go if you want to retain your sanity.

      Interviewer: You're kidding...?

      Stroustrup: Not a bit of it. In fact, there was another problem. Unix was written in 'C', which meant that any 'C' programmer could very easily become a systems programmer. Remember what a mainframe systems programmer used to earn?

      Interviewer: You bet I do, that's what I used to do.

      Stroustrup: OK, so this new language had to divorce itself from Unix, by hiding all the system calls that bound the two together so nicely. This would enable guys who only knew about DOS to earn a decent living too.

      Interviewer: I don't believe you said that...

      Stroustrup: Well, it's been long enough, now, and I believe most people have figured out for themselves that C++ is a waste of time but, I must say, it's taken them a lot longer than I thought it would.

      Interviewer: So how exactly did you do it?

      Stroustrup: It was only supposed to be a joke, I never thought people would take the book seriously. Anyone with half a brain can see that object-oriented programming is counter-intuitive, illogical and inefficient.

      Interviewer: What?

      Stroustrup: And as for 're-useable code' - when did you ever hear of a company re-using its code?

      Interviewer: Well, never, actually, but...

      Stroustrup: There you are then. Mind you, a few tried, in the early days. There was this Oregon company - Mentor Graphics, I think they were called - really caught a cold trying to rewrite everything in C++ in about '90 or '91. I felt sorry for them really, but I thought people would learn from their mistakes.

      Interviewer: Obviously, they didn't?

      Stroustrup: Not in the slightest. Trouble is, most companies hush-up all their major blunders, and explaining a $30 million loss to the shareholders would have been difficult. Give them their due, though, they made it work in the end.

      Interviewer: They did? Well, there you are then, it proves O-O works.

      Stroustrup: Well, almost. The executable was so huge, it took five minutes to load, on an HP workstation, with 128MB of RAM. Then it ran like treacle. Actually, I thought this would be a majo
      [ Parent ]
    • Re:uh... (Score:5, Funny)

      by larry bagina (561269) on Monday August 13, @07:11AM (#20210621)
      (Last Journal: Friday October 19, @09:21PM)
      exception: slashdot editors.
      [ Parent ]
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
  • At least we won't get any "RTFA, moron!" comments in this article.

    But seriously, I like slashdot because, unlike digg, we get ARTICLES, not videos. I'm not watching this. In protest, here's a completely misinformed and irrelevant comment which extrapolates a lot of very outlandish conclusions from the article summary:

    Stoustrup just wants to make sure VC++ doesn't eat into the market share of his new linux-powered RC car, CTTOX. He has been embracing and extending C ofr many years now; if congress weren't so impeachment-obsessed, they would have slapped him with anticompetitive sanctions. What is a doctor doing talking about languages anyhow, he should leave that to linguists like Alan Cox and stick to paediatric medicine.

    Or, to rephrase, give me text links or give me fatal and catastrophic loss of message and meaning

  • In other news. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13, @06:19AM (#20210343)
    The future of BASIC has been envisioned as a language to do more and more intricate beeping loops in high school classes.
  • but... (Score:1)

    what about extinguish? jk, i love visual studio... (there actually are some nice features, imo.)
  • Next version? (Score:5, Funny)

    by tygerstripes (832644) on Monday August 13, @06:24AM (#20210357)
    Great - I've been hearing a lot about C-Pound [worsethanfailure.com].
  • Torrents of vid available (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13, @06:26AM (#20210373)
    Please use the torrents, and keep those torrent up and running after you're done d/l'ing.

    http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/files/stroustrup.ogg.to rrent [uwaterloo.ca] Ogg/Theora (Recommended)
    http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/files/stroustrup.avi.to rrent [uwaterloo.ca] XviD
    http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/files/stroustrup.mp4.to rrent [uwaterloo.ca] MP4
    http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/files/stroustrup.mpg.to rrent [uwaterloo.ca] MPEG

    AC to prevent karma whoring.
  • The problem with VC++ (Score:5, Insightful)

    Is that they have given 95% of the development time toward managed languages.

    If you look at the new Visual Studio 2008 - in the three years since 2005 was released, what does Orcas have for C/C++? Still no C99, with open admission that there are no plans to support it. No TR1 for C++. No significant compiler changes. Intellisense is still slow and quite easily stops working all together. Still no assembly support in the 64-bit compiler, missing intrinsic functions for important instructions such as CMPXCHG16B.

    What we get is a newer bundled Windows SDK (which you can download NOW), updated MFC libraries (yuck), and a few new options for Vista compatibility.

    In three years, .NET has advanced from 2.0 to 3.5 with huge changes like WPF, WCF, LINQ, etc. They have all but forgotten C++.
    • Re:The problem with VC++ by Constantine XVI (Score:2) Monday August 13, @06:43AM
      • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
    • Re:The problem with VC++ by mwvdlee (Score:2) Monday August 13, @06:45AM
    • Parent is trolling (Score:4, Informative)

      by Interfacer (560564) on Monday August 13, @06:52AM (#20210513)
      C99 is driven by customer demand. And I don't mean as in a bunch of geeks saying 'implement ALL of C99 now!' but as in they work with their enterprise customers to prioritize features.

      TR1 WILL be supported as soon as C++0x is finalized. Not sooner. If they would implement is now, it would likely change as soon as the new standard is ratified. Of course, even if they would implement now, you would criticise them as soon as the standard is ratified because ZOMG! Microsoft's TR1 is proprietary and out of date! LOLOLOLROFLMAO!
      I suspect they will simply license TR1 from dinkumware which is feature complete with the current state of TR1.

      Intellisense is a dog. People are working on it, and a lot of redesign is going on. Not just for intellisense, but for the whole compiler architecture to make it more scalable and plufable.

      And I don't know where you are getting your info from, but asm is perfectly supported in 64 bit. Just inline assembly isn't because for 64 bit code this would make it non-portable between different 64 bit architectures.
      You can still add asm files to your VC++ project and compile them.

      And you can say yuck to MFC and I would agree. But a very large number of enterprise businesses still builds massive VC++ applications that use it extensively. maintaining and improving it makes lots of business sense.

      And finally, C++ is not meant to be as RAD as C# and VB because that would require a lot of manpower which cannot be justified. VC++ is targeted for interoperability, performance and control over the program execution. Not for whipping up a data driven LINQ doc. People who want to use LINQ would simply build a C# project for data interaction and add it to their mixed mode C++ project.
      [ Parent ]
      • Re:Parent is trolling (Score:4, Interesting)

        These are complaints, not trolls. I develop primarily in C++ and am ecstatic about C++0x, and dread seeing my favorite IDE/compiler get put on the backburner and not implement modern unmanaged programming. I don't want to wait 10 years to see C++0x and TR1. They could have easily included Dinkumware's TR1 implementation with it, even in a seperate tr1 namespace, and be sure - everyone would be much much happier.

        C++ was not meant to be RAD like C#, but VC++'s compiler and IDE are _far_ from perfect. There are still several annoying little issues you come across when you play with real C++. My point was that there is so much room for improvement in the C++ compiler but they have completely neglected it and the IDE to implement features for their proprietary languages. Which all in all, this being Microsoft, is not that surprising - but it is still a shame.

        You got one thing right - I did mean inline assembly (sorry, typos happen). It would be just as non-portable as using seperate .asm files - the functionality was there in the x86 compiler, am I to assume they completely rewrote the compiler enough that it would take vast effort to enable this basic functionality for x64?
        [ Parent ]
      • Re:Parent is trolling by MORB (Score:3) Monday August 13, @08:17AM
      • Re:Parent is trolling by m2943 (Score:1) Monday August 13, @10:58AM
      • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
    • Re:The problem with VC++ (Score:5, Informative)

      by Jugalator (259273) on Monday August 13, @07:34AM (#20210729)
      (Last Journal: Monday February 13 2006, @07:11PM)
      This discussion came up again with Visual Studio 2008 "Orcas" and plans seemingly a bit lacking once again for an improved C++ feature set and general love for IntelliSense, etc.

      Microsoft had the following to say:
      http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?Pos tID=970938&SiteID=1 [microsoft.com]

      See bdunlap's response.
      [ Parent ]
    • Re:The problem with VC++ by rbanffy (Score:3) Monday August 13, @07:44AM
    • Re:The problem with VC++ (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Brave Guy (457657) on Monday August 13, @07:45AM (#20210825)

      If you look at the new Visual Studio 2008 - in the three years since 2005 was released, what does Orcas have for C/C++?

      I'll see you VC++ 2008 and raise you VC++ .Net (aka VC++ 7.0, aka the 2002 release).

      The sad thing is, from a pure C++ programmer's point of view, a lot of people still regard VC++ 6 as the peak. Sure, the standards compliance is better now, and that's a real improvement. Sure, there have been a few optimisation improvements, and those are worthwhile (when they don't introduce bugs). Sure, the debugger has better visualisation support (autoexp.dat) even for native code, and that's definitely useful (if only they'd document it properly).

      But when they moved to .Net for everything, the IDE slowed down horribly, even without the Intellisense/multi-threading mess that they finally fixed in 2005SP1. Certain features (I'm looking at you, browse toolbar) actually disappeared from VC++, for the rather poor reason that they couldn't be supported in all .Net languages. I understand that the whole unified architecture thing makes sense from a development perspective at Microsoft, but the bottom line is that users don't care, and removing useful functionality is bad. I also appreciate that, several versions later, we now have most of the same basic functionality back again, but it's still a mess compared to the simple, effective browse toolbar. Similar comments apply to various being-too-clever changes to Intellisense, incidentally.

      Perhaps more seriously, as great as all these new optimisations are, we've found far more compiler bugs recently than we ever used to. We write serious mathematical libraries at work, and I promise you it is not fun to spend several days tracking down a bizarre floating point problem, because it turned out that the global optimiser got it wrong fifteen functions up the call stack and now the FPU stack is overflowing.

      Meanwhile, we get to see Microsoft putting lots of goodies in for .Net developers. I'm sure they'd love us all to develop for .Net, but until they support it on seven different platforms (where all versions of "Windows" are grouped together as just one of those), it's never going to be of much interest to us.

      Right now, Visual C++ is still (in my personal opinion) the best C++ compiler/IDE combination available today. But things move fast in software. Code compiled with g++ has lagged in performance for a long time, but if the recent work behind the scenes on things like SSA bears fruit, that performance gap could close very fast. Eclipse/CDT is so clunky as to be almost unusable for C++ development right now (don't flame me, it's just a personal opinion) but I check every now and then to see how things are going and it sounds like someone might be planning a big clean-up so it doesn't feel like C++ forced into a Java-friendly IDE any more. With Microsoft pushing all their funky new UI support into things like WPF that almost no-one uses, and portable GUI toolkits like wxWidgets and Qt becoming better all the time, it's not like having MFC support is a great bonus for new developments anyway.

      In other words, if VC++ 2008 doesn't deliver real improvements for non-.Net-only C++ developers, it's entirely possible that the serious players will be switching to genuinely better open source alternatives for new developments well before the next version of VC++ is out. And that should scare Microsoft, because the superiority of VC++ and the ease of use of VB are the reason so many people have been making effectively Windows-only software for so long.

      [ Parent ]
    • Re:The problem with VC++ by Blakey Rat (Score:3) Monday August 13, @07:53AM
    • Re:The problem with VC++ by spectrokid (Score:3) Monday August 13, @08:12AM
    • Re:The problem with VC++ by nschubach (Score:1) Monday August 13, @08:53AM
    • Re:The problem with VC++ by turm (Score:1) Monday August 13, @12:39PM
    • Re:The problem with VC++ by dwye (Score:1) Monday August 13, @01:41PM
  • Just one thing (Score:2)

    by jeti (105266) on Monday August 13, @06:28AM (#20210381)
    (http://www.radialthinking.de/)
    Please implement delegates and get rid of the method pointers.

    Thank you.
  • With all respect... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by 2Bits (167227) on Monday August 13, @06:55AM (#20210529)
    (http://www.idsignet.com/)
    to Stroustrup, but don't you think it's a bit ironic that the creator of such a monstrosity is talking about ideal of programming languages? And don't even get me into the the differences between implementations!

    Yeah, go ahead, bring out your flame hose. Even if I had to burn in hell, this thing is still a monstrosity.

    • Re:With all respect... by ardor (Score:3) Monday August 13, @07:04AM
      • Re:With all respect... by MichaelSmith (Score:2) Monday August 13, @07:10AM
      • Re:With all respect... by Dr. Manhattan (Score:3) Monday August 13, @07:39AM
      • Re:With all respect... by rbanffy (Score:2) Monday August 13, @08:09AM
      • Replacing C++? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Brave Guy (457657) on Monday August 13, @08:14AM (#20211079)

        C++ is far too complex yes. But there is nothing that can really replace it. A language which supports functional, generic, procedural, object-oriented programming, with static typing, metaprogramming, and heavily geared towards native building?

        The thing is, most development projects that use C++ today don't need all of that.

        C++ is a fine, pragmatic tool, and I have great admiration for Stroustrup's ability to build such a useful thing. C++ is also a powerful systems programming tool.

        But C++ is not a good language for most application development, which is what a great deal of code written in it really is. I think there are several separate but somewhat related reasons for this.

        One is the safety argument. Most people simply don't need the flexibility/footshootability [delete as applicable] of C++. You need only look at the much-hyped field of garbage collection to see that (a) many professional developers find this one feature useful that they regard Java as superior to C++ for this reason alone, (b) many more professional developers have no clue about the overheads involved (which are almost zero for typical applications using modern approaches to GC implementation), and most importantly (c) a great many developers using languages without GC make mistakes that developers using languages with GC wouldn't. Similar arguments apply to other routine problems, such as pointers/NULL.

        The second is the expressive power argument. Life is too short to be using programming languages with primitive, error-prone control flow constructs, functions that aren't first-order entities, no syntactic support for common data structures, crude macros, header files, etc.

        Third we have the standard library argument. Yes, yes, you can get a C++ library for almost anything. That's not the point. The key word is "standard". Take a look at the huge practical success of Java and Perl, and tell me the vast Java standard library and CPAN have nothing to do with them. Sure, C++'s standard library is, technically, of a higher quality than most. But it still has stupid flaws (string support and IO streams are both fundamentally broken, for example). More seriously, it has stupid gaps. In the 21st century, it's hard to seriously advocate application development in a language with no standardised support for user interfaces, networking, concurrency, file systems, etc. No, I'm not going to spend days trying to find the right non-standard library for me. Non-standard libraries are for solving significant problems, where the difficulty and scope make it worth investing the time to find and hook in someone else's code. They're not for trivia that everyone uses all the time.

        And finally, we have the tools argument. Working with header files sucks, and while just about everyone else is playing with their funky, auto-refactoring, navigation supporting editors, what do we have? VC++ (where refactoring still isn't available in native C++) and Eclipse (which is C++ forced into a Java-like IDE)?

        The really scary thing is that reality bites now. It's not like I'm the first person to identify these practical flaws with using C++ for application development. It's not like other people haven't developed languages and tools with all these improvements already. And yet C++ continues to be one of the most important application programming languages today. Why?

        Momentum. That's why. Building a new programming language with a syntax that doesn't look like C is asking for trouble; just look at the arguments Python sees over whitespace. (Curiously, I've never seen such complaints made about Haskell. Perhaps this shows a difference between the insight of your average professional programmer vs. your average language geek academic?) More to the point, trying to advocate a new programming language for industrial application development that isn't some form of block-structured, OO-based clone is asking for trouble.

        I'm hopeful that over the next few years, as hardwar

        [ Parent ]
      • Pointer arithmetics is key by marcosdumay (Score:2) Monday August 13, @08:27AM
        • It is?! by Anonymous Brave Guy (Score:3) Monday August 13, @09:14AM
          • Re:It is?! by cerelib (Score:3) Monday August 13, @09:50AM
            • Re:It is?! by 0xABADC0DA (Score:2) Monday August 13, @01:21PM
              • Re:It is?! by iluvcapra (Score:2) Monday August 13, @03:28PM
              • Re:It is?! by cerelib (Score:2) Monday August 13, @05:22PM
              • Re:It is?! by 0xABADC0DA (Score:2) Monday August 13, @04:59PM
              • Re:It is?! by iluvcapra (Score:2) Monday August 13, @05:30PM
              • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
          • Re:It is?! by marcosdumay (Score:2) Monday August 13, @01:33PM
            • Re:It is?! by Anonymous Brave Guy (Score:2) Monday August 13, @02:14PM
              • Re:It is?! by marcosdumay (Score:2) Tuesday August 14, @07:55AM
      • Re:With all respect... by m2943 (Score:1) Monday August 13, @11:11AM
      • Re:With all respect... by k-zed (Score:2) Monday August 13, @11:20AM
      • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
    • Re:With all respect... by Rick BigNail (Score:1) Tuesday August 14, @08:22PM
    • Re:With all respect... by Goaway (Score:2) Monday August 13, @08:23AM
    • Re:With all respect... by MemoryDragon (Score:2) Monday August 13, @02:49PM
    • 2 replies beneath your current threshold.
  • 3...2...1... (Score:2, Funny)

    by kazade84 (1078337) on Monday August 13, @07:25AM (#20210687)
    and let the syntax criticizing begin ;)
  • not bad... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rgravina (520410) on Monday August 13, @07:28AM (#20210697)
    Recently, I've just started getting into C++, and I can't understand why so many people hate the language with such a passion. The thing is, if you need/want to write your program in a compiled language with plenty of library support, then aside from C, what options are there? I'm not trying to start a flamewar, but I figure if I want to say use C (or other C++) libraries and a compiled language then I feel C++ is much better option than C. One very smart and experienced C programmer I know hates C++ with a passion complaining that "it's too complex" and just rejecting it outright.

    I haven't yet written (or debugged) any large programs in C++, so that could be why I'm still enthusastic. Perhaps after some time with the language I might see what everyone is so worked up about.

    I'm reading through "Effective C++" by Scott Meyers, and although the language seems like it has its warts and complexity, it also offers a great deal of power and is a hell of a lot more fun to program in than C because you get the abstraction support of objects, namespaces etc. Streams - awsome. Shared (reference counting) pointers - awsome. Less need for the preprocessor - awsome. And the standard library (plus Boost too) is so vast... containers, algorithms, it's all there.

    Python is still my favourite general-purpose language, but if I need something compiled, then I don't see what is so bad about C++. Sure, Objective-C is a far better approach to the "lets-make-a-better-C" idea, but I'm not sure how to use it (and the standard library) outside of OSX or GNUStep.
  • Watch the video (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dysfunct (940221) * on Monday August 13, @07:35AM (#20210743)
    As an autodidact I'm easily bored by overly long and dry technical presentations of what could be read through in a couple of minutes, but this video is getting very interesting and funny after the first couple if minutes. Lots of insight into the process of creating the new standards and and all the thoughts that go into it, mixed with anecdotes, random trivia and geek humor by Bjarne Stroustrup himself. I'm actually considering downloading the 700mb xvid version of the talk and making me some popcorn to go with it. IMO, even if you're not a C++ geek it's actually worth watching.
  • by ezdude (885983) on Monday August 13, @07:37AM (#20210757)
    And it looks something like Haskell. Static typing, lazy evaluation, high-level parallelism, pure functionality, explicit imperative-ness. Heck, monads even sound like something from the future.
  • Dr. Stroustrup [wikipedia.org] made a great contribution by designing the C++ language. However, in recent years it seems to me that he has been taking a leisurely approach to making improvements.

    Stroustrup is, unlike most programmers, an excellent writer. His FAQ [att.com] is an example. Quote: "What's a good certification for C++ programmers? To the best of my knowledge, there isn't a good certification program for C++ programmers. That's a pity. A good certification program would be most useful. However, C++ lacks the central organization that would produce a solid certification program, and a certification program without authority or that focused on syntax would be worse than useless."

    I'm certainly not an expert in this subject. However, I get the same impression from the words "C++ lacks the central organization" in that paragraph that I get from his other recent work. Something like, "What, me be a leader?"

    Note that Java and C#, which are sometimes seen as replacements for C++, are proprietary languages from companies that are routinely mismanaged. If you use those languages, you partner with those companies, and it is possible that you too will suffer from their mismanagement. For that reason, there is a big need for strong leadership in maintaining a language unencumbered by issues of proprietary behavior.

    Concerning Java, Dr. Stroustrup says [att.com] "Java isn't platform independent; it is a platform. Like Windows, it is a proprietary commercial platform. That is, you can write programs for Windows/Intel or Java/JVM, and in each case you are writing code for a platform owned by a single corporation and tweaked for the commercial benefit of that corporation."

    Concerning C#, he says [att.com], "It will take a lot to persuade me that the world needs yet another proprietary language (YAPL). It will be especially hard to persuade me that it needs a language that is closely integrated with a specific proprietary operating system."

    Again, I'm not an expert in this area, but it seems to me that Dr. Stroustrup tends to define his leadership narrowly and concern himself with programming constructs rather than larger issues such as extension, standardization, and certification of libraries, for example. About C++ garbage collection he says, partly: "See ... Hans-J. Boehm's site [att.com]". It seems to me that there are too many areas in which the C++ answer is "You can just go there", rather than "This is the standard, certified method."

    It's amazing to me, but true leaders are very rare. After all these years, we still depend on Dr. Stroustrup, even though he has been less than a complete leader in the more social aspects of developing the C++ language, in my opinion.
  • by Phatmanotoo (719777) on Monday August 13, @08:12AM (#20211049)

    Someone had to mention his other famous interview [nsbasic.com].

    The way I see C++ these days: it might be your only choice if you are building a mass-market "horizontal" app (like, say, mozilla), and even then I would consider alternatives such as Objective C or plain ANSI C. But for "enterprise" apps, it is absolutely dreadful! Like someone said, it is the language with the most error-inducing features.

    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
  • by theendlessnow (516149) * on Monday August 13, @09:52AM (#20212129)
    I tried to post a comment on this story, but was unable to upload my video response.
    (sigh)
  • Flapping bird? (Score:2)

    by dazedNconfuzed (154242) on Monday August 13, @09:57AM (#20212199)
    Site has been /.ed; in the video, does he alleviate viewer boredom by occasionally pulling a string to make a model bird flap its wings?

  • by r00t (33219) on Monday August 13, @10:16AM (#20212433)
    (Last Journal: Friday May 05 2006, @11:53PM)
    Got a pet feature you like? Fine, it gets added to the language. Never mind if it is redundant. Never mind if it causes the standard to be ambiguous or self-contradictory. Never mind if it is impossible to implement. Never mind if it will cause error messages to be misleading.

    There exist C programmers. C++ programmers do not exist, because nobody knows the whole language. Lots of people can handle a subset of C++. (which they THINK is big, but is not) Put two of these C++ subset programmers on the same project and you have a problem. At least one of them, often both, is writing code that the other doesn't really fully understand.
  • give it a rest (Score:3, Insightful)

    by m2943 (1140797) on Monday August 13, @10:55AM (#20212909)
    C++ is my main development language right now, but I have to say: please give it a rest. C++ is what it is, and I don't think adding even more crap to it is going to make it any better.

    What we need is a language with C++-like performance characteristics and a C-like syntax that will feel familiar to C/C++ programmers but without all the baggage of 30+ years of C history.

    (And, no, neither Java nor C# are that language.)
  • What follows C++ is probably (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13, @11:17AM (#20213179)
    a new language like D and not just an improved C++.

    As a C++ programmer, I can tell you that it is nearly impossible for C++ to make coding, compiling and debugging easier without redesigning the language.

    Coding: Name one C++ editor or IDE that offers accurate code completion or code refactoring (compared to other languages.) I've tried Source Insight, SlickEdit 2007, Visual Studio 2005, Understand for C++, Vim, etc. and it is clear C++ is too complex compared to most other mainstream programming languages.

    Compiling: Implementing a C++ compiler is far too difficult. And compiling takes too long even when you use C++ idioms like pimpl.

    Debugging: Sure, boost.org's smartpointers and RAII are helpful but how many hours do C++ programmers spend tracking down bugs that would've taken minutes (if not seconds) to track down or avoid in other programming languages?

    Why do I use C++? Because it is compiled, has numerous 3rd-party libraries, and is widely used. Like Windows XP, it might be a pain but it is so widely used that you'll have no problems finding employers that will pay you to use it.

    Simply put, we deserve something better than C++ and it isn't going to be enough to enhance C++ because a full redesign is needed in order to address the issues noted above. We need and deserve a language that takes what we've learned from C++ and is designed from the ground up to address those issues.

    So far, D programming language seems to offer the best hope, and some really talented C++ gurus like Walter Bright and Andrei Alexandrescu are involved.
  • Strostrup is now part of the problem. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13, @11:19AM (#20213201)

    C++ has many problems. Some, like "an array is a pointer", it inherited from C. Some were mistakes in the original design that were later fixed, like unchecked downcasts, "this" as a pointer rather than a reference, and the lack of generics. And some are there because Strostrup is in denial about the problems, like the fact that the language gives no help with either thread or memory management.

    Memory management remains the biggest problem. The fundamental problem is that C and C++ require the programmer to obsess on who owns what, while providing zero assistance in managing that information.There are ways out of this, involving syntax and compiler support for owning and non-owning pointers. But instead, attempts have been made to paper over the problem with templates. This never quite works, because for some things you still need a raw pointer, which breaks the abstraction. The history of auto_ptr (up to standard revision #4 now, I think) makes this clear.

    Bolting on a garbage collector doesn't help much in a language with destructors; see the mess in Microsoft's "managed C++". If you're going to go with a garbage collected approach, it's better to go to a language designed for it, like Java.

    Most of the standards effort is going into template features that few will use and fewer still will use well. Trying to use the template expansion engine as a general purpose macro system is a terrible idea for production code. But it has a big fan club on the standards committee. Worse, the C++ commitee does very little to improve language safety and reliability. Which is why we still have buffer overflows in C++ code, fifteen years in.

    Incidentally, none of this has anything to do with C++ being compiled directly to machine code. There have been safer compilable languages usable for system-level programming. Modula 3 was probably as good as it got. But that language died when DEC went under. It's possible to hard-compile Java; there's a version of GCC for that, and it's getting some interest in the embedded community. The problem could be fixed. But it won't be, because the people responsible are in denial.

  • null keyword rant (Score:3, Insightful)

    by wiredlogic (135348) on Monday August 13, @11:59AM (#20213677)
    Could it really have been that difficult to add a "null" keyword to C++? "bool" was cleanly added to C99. We could have had "null" too. I accept the argument that (void*)() isn't typesafe but then the language expects you to throw around a literal integer "0" that is imbued with magical properties. How is this a cleaner solution? This magic 0 violates the type safety principal that got us into this rathole to begin with since it can be assigned to non-integral types (pointers). It can also transform itself into another value since the null address isn't necessarily 0 on all platforms.
  • Rant (Score:2, Interesting)

    by treak007 (985345) on Monday August 13, @01:22PM (#20214745)
    (Last Journal: Monday September 18 2006, @01:00PM)
    Virtual machines like the JVM are all the rage nowadays. Sure they are cross-platform and have some benefits, but they will never replace true natively built code. C++ is a powerful tool that I use daily, and I would said it was anything but dying.

    C++ has a lot of different features, which is why some find it confusing, but it is those many features which allow the language to be so flexible. Whereas a language, again picking on java, such as java forces the programmer to follow a very strict object-oriented form, C++ gives the programmer a choice as to how they want to write their code. I can write very object-oriented code, with features java doesn't support such as operator overloading and multiple inheritance, or I can write very functional-based code that resembles C. Also, C++ gives the programmer true control over what is going on inside their application. In java for example, objects are passed by reference and primitives are passed by value. In C++, I can specify which of the two I want for either type on a per argument basis. Another example is exceptions, which are known to be a rather slow feature in a language. In a language such as Java, again sorry java fans, exceptions are an integral part of the runtime interpreter. In C++, if I find that I don't wish to use exceptions, I can disable support for them and regain that performance boost that was lost at the hands of exception checking.

    Alright, alright..I am done ranting for now. All I guess I am trying to say is that yeah, maybe C++ is a bit more confusing to a beginner then interpreted languages and the like, but it is those features which can be confusing that allow a programmer to really control their code. The better the programmer understands what the code they are writing is doing, the better code they will write. That being said, long live bit flags, unsigned variable types, multiple inheritance, operator overloading and raw pointers!

    -Your Local /. C++ fanboy.
    • Re:Rant by Shados (Score:2) Monday August 13, @09:28PM
      • Re:Rant by treak007 (Score:1) Monday August 13, @11:43PM
        • Re:Rant by Shados (Score:2) Tuesday August 14, @07:05AM
          • Re:Rant by treak007 (Score:1) Tuesday August 14, @08:56AM
            • Re:Rant by Shados (Score:2) Tuesday August 14, @11:07AM
              • Re:Rant by treak007 (Score:2) Tuesday August 14, @11:33AM
  • by peter303 (12292) on Monday August 13, @03:37PM (#20216451)
    I heard the [ recently deceased ] inventor of FORTRAN talk about the future of computer programming in the late 1980s. Kind of remineded me Bjorn's talk. You can only take a dead horse so far. Incidentally Backus was working on Functional Programming languages at that time, kind of APL for the those with long memories.
  • by mastermemorex (1119537) on Monday August 13, @07:04PM (#20218985)
    I want to argue that C syntax is developed to work only a CPU. If you want to make a code for a GPU for example there is a language with similar syntax to C say HLSL or GLSL or Cg. And the future is GPU, FPGA, parallel computing, multithreading clustering and specialized hardware. As long as C cannot extend its primitives to vertor3f or matrix44 and able to unified all the hardware improvements this language is dead in less than one decade or sooner. Maybe it must be something between C and the assembler, lets say B?

    For me C++ is also almost dead. As a programmer I need something that works and makes my job easier. And I cannot wait to have multithreading, garbage collector, metaprogramming, modularity, standard GUIs and so on while this features has been running a loong ago, since the mid 90's. I like some aspects of C# and I dislike some other aspects, but rather prefer a lot over C++, nevertheless its design has a breach between native C and I think it is intentionally.

    I agree to use the right tool for the right job. Well I have a problem. Maybe someone can help me. I have to use a library that has been developed during 8 years and it is made in C. No mention the library is huge and it takes 15 minutes to compile and to miss "xxx.h" makes me waste ours of work time. Now let's move some of the core algorithms to run them in a GPU. So let's introduce another compiler (CUDA if you ask) to the project. But now it comes the best. Let's add another layer so we can have a GUI application over OpenGL. Cannot be C. C++ is insane. Maybe C#, Java? How I link it to the core? This project is insane, isn't it?

    I have seen D for a while and it looks like very promising I think I will start to support it with some modest contribution.
  • C++ is dying while C is thriving (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MobyDisk (75490) on Thursday August 16, @07:43AM (#20247825)
    (http://www.mobydisk.com/)
    What is odd to me is that I see new stuff written in C all the time for embedded systems, *nix code, drivers, etc. It's odd because C++ is merely language extensions on top of C. There's really no down-side to using C++ at all (queue the thread of trolls telling me how awful OOP is and why C++ forces them to use it). My guess is that the problem is g++: I am currently writing some code for the Nintendo DS, and if I compile it in gcc the code is 100k smaller than when I compile the same thing in g++, even before using the OOP features. I don't know why, but I know other people have reported the same issues. This is perpetuatating the myths that C++ is bloated. Really, we need C++ in a lot of ways but the tools are making it look bad.
  • Re:C Plus Plus Bye Bye (Score:5, Informative)

    by Omni-Cognate (620505) on Monday August 13, @06:50AM (#20210499)

    Not that job listings are a particularly good indicator of anything, but from Monster:

    The C++ ones include plenty of new systems.

    [ Parent ]
  • Re:C Plus Plus Bye Bye (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ardor (673957) on Monday August 13, @06:56AM (#20210535)
    If you really understand C++, migrating to C# is very easy. C#->C++ however...

    but, if we talk about managed languages, I'd go straight for Python or Common Lisp.
    [ Parent ]
  • Re:C Plus Plus Bye Bye (Score:3, Interesting)

    by everphilski (877346) on Monday August 13, @08:34AM (#20211263)
    (Last Journal: Tuesday June 06 2006, @01:50PM)
    C++ has gone the way of Fortran

    Sadly, I generate new Fortran code on a regular basis. I wish I was generating new C++ ...
    [ Parent ]
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