21st Century C++ (Feb. 2025) by Bjarne Stroustrup
37 comments
·February 5, 2025nialv7
How does enforcing profiles per-translation unit make any sense? Some of these guarantees can only be enforced if assumptions are made about data/references coming from other translation units.
imron
I want to love C++.
Over my career I’ve written hundreds of thousands of lines of it.
But keeping up with it is time consuming and more and more I find myself reaching for other languages.
erwincoumans
Same here.
>>contemporary C++30 can express the ideas embodied in such old-style code far simpler
IMO, newer C++ versions are becoming more complex (too many ways to do the same thing), less readable (prefer explicit types over 'auto', unless unavoidable) and harder to analyse performance and memory implications (hard to even track down what is happening under the hood).
I wish the C++ language and standard library would have been left alone, and efforts went into another language, say improving Rust instead.
midnightclubbed
I have used auto liberally for 8+ years; maybe I'm accustomed to reading code containing it but I really can't think of it being a problem. I feel like auto increases readability, the only thing I dislike is that they didnt make it a reference by default.
Where do you see difficult to track down performance/memory implications? Lambda comes to mind and maybe coroutines (yet to use them but guessing there may be some memory allocations under the hood). I like that I can breakpoint my C++ code and look at the disassembly if I am concerned that the compiler did something other than expected.
musicale
I just wish they hadn't repurposed the old "auto" keyword from C and had used a new keyword like "var" or "let".
#define var auto
#define let autoWilliam_BB
E.g. `std::ranges::for_each`, where lambda captures a bunch of variables by reference. Like I would hope the compiler optimizes this to be the same as a regular loop. But can I be certain, when compared to a good old for loop?
markus_zhang
I think it's good enough or side projects. More powerful than C so I don't need to hand roll strings and some algos but I tend to keep a minimum number of features because I'm such an amateur.
xyproto
I went from being curious about C++, to hating C++, to wanting to love it, to being fine with it, to using it for work for 5+ years, to abandoning it and finally to want to use it for game development, maybe. It's the circle of life.
codr7
I've been writing C++ since 1996-ish.
Less and less, for sure.
Nothing the past few years.
They killed it.
mr_00ff00
If you only read HN, you would think C++ died years ago.
As someone who worked in HFT, C++ is very much alive and new projects continue to be created in it simply because of the sheer of amount of experts in it. (For better or for worse)
markus_zhang
I have listened to a few podcasts by HFT people. Looks like you try to maximize performance and use a lot of C++ skills. Very interesting to listen to but I wonder how does anyone pick up the skills?
3vidence
Can also confirm c++ is alive and well at FAANG. Might still be the most popular language for most new projects.
musicale
Took me a moment to realize that "killed it" was being used in the negative sense.
midnightclubbed
You don't 'have' to keep up with the language and I don't know that many people try to keep up with every single new feature - but it is worse to be one of those programmers for whom C++ stopped at C++03 and fight any feature introduced since then (the same people generally have strong opinions about templates too).
There are certainly better tools for many jobs and it is important to have languages to reach for depending on the task at hand. I don't know that anything is better than C++ for performance sensitive code.
rvz
On the other hand, the decline of robust and high quality software started with the introduction of very immature languages such as both javascript or typescript ecosystems.
It's really any other language other than those two.
gosub100
since -14 or -17 I feel no need to keep up with it. thats cool if they add a bunch more stuff, but what I'm using works great now. I only feel some "peer pressure" to signal to other people that I know c++20, but as of now, I've put nothing into it. I think it's best to lag behind a few years (for this language, specifically).
midnightclubbed
The compilers tend to lag a few years behind the language spec too, especially if you have to support platforms where the toolchains lag latest gcc/clang (Apple / Android / game consoles).
Respectfully, you might want to add at least a few C++20 features into your daily usage?
consteval/constinit guarantees to do what you usually want constexpr to do. Have personally found it great for making lookup tables and reducing the numbers of constants in code (and c++23 expands what can be done in consteval).
Designated initializer is a game-changer for filling structures. No more accidentally populating the wrong value into a structure initializer or writing individual assignments for each value you want to initialize.
atombender
Previous from 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42952720 (103 points, 85 comments)
mindcrime
I was an extreme C++ bigot back in the late 90's, early 2000's. My license plate back then was CPPHACKR[1]. But industry trends and other things took my career in the direction of favoring Java, and I've spent most of the last 20+ years thinking of myself as mainly a "Java guy". But I keep buying new C++ books and I always install the C++ tooling on any new box I build. I tell myself that "one day" I'm going to invest the time to bone up on all the new goodies in C++ since I last touched it, and have another go.
When the heck that day will actually arrive, FSM only knows. The will is sort-of there, but there are just SO many other things competing for my time and attention. :-(
[1]: funny side story about that. For anybody too young to remember just how hot the job market was back then... one day I was sitting stopped at a traffic light in Durham (NC). I'm just minding my own business, waiting for the light to change, when I catch a glimpse out of my side mirror, of somebody on foot, running towards my car. The guy gets right up to my car, and I think I had my window down already anyway. Anyway, the guy gets up to me, panting and out of breath from the run and he's like "Hey, I noticed your license plate and was wondering if you were looking for a new job." About then the light turned green in my direction, and I'm sitting there for a second in just stunned disbelief. This guy got out of his car, ran a few car lengths, to approach a stranger in traffic, to try to recruit him. I wasn't going to sit there and have a conversation with horns honking all around me, so I just yelled "sorry man" and drove off. One of the weirder experiences of my life.
ttul
The programmers on the sound team at the video game company I worked for as an intern in 1998 would always stash a couple of extra void pointers in their classes just in case they needed to add something in later. Programmers should never lose sight of pragmatism. Seeking perfection doesn’t help you ship on time. And often, time to completion matters far more than robustness.
ninkendo
Funny, sounds like the Simpsons gag from the same time period: “what’s wrong with this country? Can’t a man walk down the street without being offered a job?”
kylecazar
AIEXPERT here I come!
pro14
what is the job market like now for C++ programmers? I'm looking for a job.
zygentoma
Who the hell typeset this?
wrs
Communications of the ACM has had unbelievably bad typography for code samples for decades (predating the web). No idea how this is allowed to continue.
rbanffy
I'm guessing someone pasted from what went into the print edition. Or Bjarne himself.
It's just the first code snippet that's messed up. The rest is merely wonky.
rgovostes
You don't use 10 spaces of indentation? It's the 21st century.
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wiseowise
I always hear about “import std” but still don’t see out of the support for it. Is it still experimental?
pro14
is the job market for C++ developers still good?
DonHopkins
Generalizing Overloading for C++2000
Bjarne Stroustrup, AT&T Labs, Florham Park, NJ, USA
Abstract
This paper outlines the proposal for generalizing the overloading rules for Standard C++ that is expected to become part of the next revision of the standard. The focus is on general ideas rather than technical details (which can be found in AT&T Labs Technical Report no. 42, April 1, 1998).
mskcc
Excellent article. Thanks for sharing.
Last weekend, I took an old cross-platform app written by somebody else between 1994-2006 in C++ and faffed around with it until it compiled and ran on my modern Mac running 14.x. I upped the CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD to 20, used Clang, and all was good. Actually, the biggest challenge was the shoddy code in the first place, which had nothing to do with its age. After I had it running, Sonar gave me 7,763 issues to fix.
The moral of the story? Backwards compatibility means never leaving your baggage behind.