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Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++

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Re: Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++

#71

Post by jcranmer »

throw827474737 wrote: post #65
brandmeyer wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A key example of this is the committee's struggle to converge on a clear set of high-level and long-term goals and priorities aligned with ours [ https://wg21.link/p2137 ]. I was frankly shocked by that goals and priorities document. The non-goals section reads like an open declaration of war against anyone whose use cases for C++ differ from GOOG and NVDA. My interpretation of Carbon is that since GOOG failed to t…

> GOOG and NVDA Why use these stock index abbrevs (or whatever they are) in this context here? GEEZ! To the topic, it sounds a bit grumpy. If we look at languages and how many evolve... many suffer the phenomenon that they almost all are Turing complete, and try to gain concise (or simple understandable) expressiveness somehow, and then they try to not break compatibility too much to varying degrees - net result: the…

Bits are in such short supply these days that it's necessary to save 32 of them. Think of all the things you could be doing with those 32 bits!

Re: Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++

#72

Post by Sebb767 »

cogman10 wrote: post #21

If you are like me and wondering "What makes carbon different from Rust or Zig? 1. The ability to interoperate with a wide variety of code, such as classes/structs and templates, not just free functions. 2. A willingness to expose the idioms of C++ into Carbon code, and the other way around, when necessary to maximize performance of the interoperability layer. 3. The use of wrappers and generic programming, including…

The syntax looks a lot like Rust, though. I'm surprised they made such a break when there explicit goal is to make migration from C++ as easy as possible. Also, Rust (from my biased point of view) is currently on its way to become the standard low-level language, so I'm not too confident that Rust-but-with-OO is enough of a selling point.

Re: Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++

#74

Post by yakubin »

kllrnohj wrote: post #66
yakubin wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's std::vector that was weirdly named. In plenty of codebases "Vector", particularly gamedev and scientific, will mean the mathematical object with that name. Other languages don't need to replicate this mistake.

Java's Vector looks around awkwardly, hoping everyone forgets it existed... ;)

Actually, I've never known it existed. You're the one who reminded me now. :)

Re: Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++

#75

Post by mrits »

cogman10 wrote: post #21

If you are like me and wondering "What makes carbon different from Rust or Zig? 1. The ability to interoperate with a wide variety of code, such as classes/structs and templates, not just free functions. 2. A willingness to expose the idioms of C++ into Carbon code, and the other way around, when necessary to maximize performance of the interoperability layer. 3. The use of wrappers and generic programming, including…

Designing a language to interop well with a single language is short sighted in my opinion. I want a clean ffi that I know will be able to iterop with Swift, Typescript, C#, C++, C, python etc... In my current project I'm currently using Rust/protobuff to do all of this and it rarely gets in my way of how I want to do things.

Re: Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++

#76

Post by m4nu3l »

pipeline_peak wrote: post #36

All these C++ "successors" that do nothing but change the syntax sugar and find ways to operate with C++ are really tiring to read about. I seem to be the only one on the planet that doesn't think the language needs to be replaced.

AFAIK this is the only one what is compatible with C++ at the source level. As much as I like C++ I think it has a lot of accidental complexity built in and the syntax is too verbose at times. I also think that a lot of people (me included) do not want to switch to something like Rust immediately because of the existing C++ code and the friction of having to make it interoperable. So I believe this is actually a great experiment. Will see whether it works or not, but I hope it will.

Re: Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++

#77

Post by kllrnohj »

mepian wrote: post #19

It's a shame a stable ABI is declared as one of the non-goals, C++ is painful enough to integrate with other languages.

C++'s current unwillingness to specify a stable ABI (or even state that ABI stability is a goal) but also have the standard libraries avoid breaking the ABI is a worst of both worlds currently. And the refusal to break the ABI adds overhead to things like std::unique_ptr which isn't really great.

This paper goes into the details https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2020/p18...

Re: Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++

#78

Post by mustache_kimono »

rvz wrote: post #49
bestouff wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm as tired as you by these cosmetic successors. But for my part I think C++ has already been replaced, and to great benefits. I couldn't thank the people building Rust enough.

I still haven't seen a cross-platform production level GUI app written in Rust. All the time, it is C++ these companies use for these apps, especially having millions of users and generating multi-millions or hundreds of millions of dollars.

"I still haven't seen a production level numerical weather prediction app written in Rust.

All the time, it is Fortran the government uses for these apps,..."

I vacillate as to whether the best response is: "Who cares?" or "give it time"? First, if C++ actually is better for GUI apps, then more power to C++ (do you have some evidence this is the case?). That doesn't mean their aren't other niches to fill for other languages, like Rust. Next, Rust is a relatively new language. It may end up that it's really great for GUI apps, but again it doesn't have to be. It can be great at other things.

Re: Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++

#79

Post by chandlerc1024 »

vitno wrote: post #16
epage wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this is a Google led project This doesn't give me much confidence if its Corporate governance rather than open governance.

The governance of the project is not immediately clear to me, and I have to assume that the Google team is working in good faith. That team cares a lot about C++ and its future. They are obviously aware of this stigma. I also think that Google is pretty bad at open source governance though :/ Disclosure: Former Google engineer who worked sorta adjacent to some of those people.

FWIW, our governance structure is here: https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/blob/trunk/do...

Re: Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++

#80

Post by pca006132 »

rvz wrote: post #49
bestouff wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm as tired as you by these cosmetic successors. But for my part I think C++ has already been replaced, and to great benefits. I couldn't thank the people building Rust enough.

I still haven't seen a cross-platform production level GUI app written in Rust. All the time, it is C++ these companies use for these apps, especially having millions of users and generating multi-millions or hundreds of millions of dollars.

Perhaps also with a large portion of legacy code that they don't want to throw away and switch to something new?
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