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Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++

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

#241

Post by jeffreygoesto »

ansible wrote: post #35

From the end of the safety document: > Overall, Carbon is making a compromise around safety in order to give a path for C++ to evolve. C++ developers must be comfortable migrating their codebases, and able to do so in a largely automated manner. In order to achieve automated migration, Carbon cannot require fundamental redesigns of migrated C++ code. While a migration tool could in theory mark all migrated code as un…

The borrow checker is a pretty smart solution pushing checks to compile time and have efficient runtime, so yes, it would be interesting to see if there is an even better alternative. But you can't beat that kind of safety into an old C++ code base, so I am pessimistic for retrofitting.

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

#242

Post by xigoi »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #185
mihaigalos wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I'm concerned, C++ is there for legacy purposes only. There are some nice frameworks and tools using it, sure. Yes, you are required to learn it if you are studying CS. Any serious new development today is done using more modern languages such as Rust (i.e.: the linkerd service mesh proxy [1] for encrypted pod communication in a k8s cluster). As even the Linux kernel is slowly transitioning to using Rust [2…

My impression as a CS grad is that very few computer science courses require you to learn C++.

I'm studying Mathematical Informatics and we have C++ as the first language.

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

#243

Post by klodolph »

zozbot234 wrote: post #27
vitno wrote: post #9

It's not immediately obvious from this page and GitHub org, but this is a Google led project. It's led by Chandler and the c++ toolchain team. I have no idea of it's endgoals or how open to non-Google ideas it will be.

Sounds a bit like "C++ but we get to change the ABI, and maybe break some old code for the sake of better-enforced safety guidelines".

C++ also has a very hard-line "you don't pay for what you don't use" philosophy, which sometimes lead to standard library APIs or language semantics which are a bit tortured.

Compare C++ or against, say, the equivalent functionality in Rust, Go, Java, C#, etc. C++'s APIs are a bit overcomplicated, or at least they look that way if you don't know the various reasons why the C++ standard defined them that way (reasons which are probably not relevant to your use cases).

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

#244

Post by agumonkey »

pron wrote: post #226
Sebb767 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Rust (from my biased point of view) is currently on its way to become the standard low-level language The evidence seems to suggest the opposite. Other than a lot of talk on programming fashion publications that are always more aspirational than representative (such as this site) Rust seems to have reached 0.3% of the market [1], up from 0.1% a couple of years ago [2], and while that is ok growth, programming langu…

I don't think rust is headed to be the norm, but I don't think it should be compared to most mainstream languages. It's not python/php/ruby.. it's a very difficult niche where a lot of efforts failed flat.

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

#245

Post by piperswe »

twen_ty wrote: post #228

No. No. No. This reminds me of Dart - another big company thinking they can invent a new language to tackle old language problems. This is not the way to improve C++ - because this path already exists, either as D or if compatibility or OO model isn't an issue, Rust. C++ has been improving slowly but surely - just remember that 90% (heck even more) of C++ issues stem from the hell that's compatibility with C and that…

Same big company actually - Dart and Carbon are both Google projects

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

#246

Post by tialaramex »

gpderetta wrote: post #151
mempko wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with C++ is it keeps getting better. There was a time when Rust was interesting to me but then C++11 came out. Then they kept improving it

Doesn't C++11 precede rust?

Rust 1.0 is 2015. Hence this is sometimes referred to as "2015 edition" in Rust's edition system.

But the sort of people who are here to tell you about how great C++ is will say well, actually Rust existed all the way back to 2006 as Graydon's personal project. There were no numbered releases until Rust 0.1 (after C++ 11) and modern features like Traits don't appear until much later, but sure, in this sense Rust existed in 2006.

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

#247

Post by xigoi »

vazgriz wrote: post #129
Joker_vD wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is objectively superior Those objective criteria of superiority being?..

It eliminates the Most Vexing Parse. Consider this C++ code: Foo bar(); A programmer could make simple mistake thinking that is declaring a variable of type Foo. Carbon eliminates this by having explicit keywords for variable and function declaration. (This style is much more Rust based than C++) fn bar() -> Foo; var bar : Foo; It makes parsing easier for both the users and maintainers of the language.

So by this logic, pretty much every language other than C++ has “objectively best” syntax.

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

#248

Post by plonk »

fsloth wrote: post #150
mempko wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with C++ is it keeps getting better. There was a time when Rust was interesting to me but then C++11 came out. Then they kept improving it

Regarding C++. IMHO - it’s not getting intrinsically better. More complex. Easy things become a bit less verbose, but the hardest things remain as hard and the compiler is as unhelpful as before. I agree C++11 and it’s successors are sugaring the language to be a lot nicer but fundamentally nothing has changed. Rust is fundamentally better in it’s compiler warnings (they are actually helpful), and contains specific s…

Fundamentally, it has smart pointers and std::make_unique now, which means I never have to touch a raw pointer in most of my code. They can even be adapted to wrap Win32 objects. That's a huge improvement and I don't mind using C++ for new projects now.

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

#249

Post by xigoi »

StillBored wrote: post #230

I've seen this fn/var argument a few times, but its a really that much harder to write a parser that can intuit the difference between a function/variable/statement without explicitly putting function/var/let/etc all over the place? I like the verbosity of a language like pascal, but I just find it jarring in a C replacement these days. (and rust's structure definitions/etc I just find needlessly verbose for the way…

The C way makes it hard to find the name of the function (or even tell that it's a function declaration) when the return type is long.

    std::vector>> foo(std::vector> x, std::unordered_map y);

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

#250

Post by pron »

cogman10 wrote: post #237
pron wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rust (from my biased point of view) is currently on its way to become the standard low-level language The evidence seems to suggest the opposite. Other than a lot of talk on programming fashion publications that are always more aspirational than representative (such as this site) Rust seems to have reached 0.3% of the market [1], up from 0.1% a couple of years ago [2], and while that is ok growth, programming langu…

> programming languages with few exception tend to reach, approach, or at least point toward their all-time peak market penetration around age 10 Notable exceptions from the links you've provided: C#, Java, Go, PHP. All appear to have an upward trajectory today. Javascript has also seen a similar penetration boost when nodejs came on the scene. With rust looking to get integration both into the Linux kernel and GCC,…

> All appear to have an upward trajectory today.

They might have an upward trajectory, but they're not posed to break well beyond their respective records. With the possible exception of Python, how popular a language is at age ten is a reasonable rough indicator of how popular it's ever going to be. At its current growth rate Rust would reach 1% market share at age ten. Again, there can certainly be surprises, but I think it's weird to say that actual current evidence clearly points to success for Rust. On the contrary, to become a success it would need to buck the trend and be quite a surprise. So it could happen, but I don't see much to support the claim that this is what's currently happening.

> With rust looking to get integration both into the Linux kernel and GCC, that points to some pretty positive things for the language's penetration.

I agree that it shows that the language is taken seriously and isn't dismissed as a possible option, and that that's very good. That indicates that the language isn't an immediate irredeemable failure, but I don't think it's an indicator of future success.

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