Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++ • Hacker News Board

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

#461

Post by germandiago » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 5:03 PM UTC

fouronnes3 wrote: post #134

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

C++ has virtually zero tooling and the committee is not interested in ever working on that. Comparing CMake to cargo is like comparing fifth century fireworks to the Space Shuttle. I mean we are getting modules that aren't literally copy paste maybe next year.

> C++ has virtually zero tooling

CMake, Meson, Waf, Conan, Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, CLion, Intel VTune, GDB, LLDB, XCode, Artifactory, SonarQube, clang-tidy, clang-format, astyle, Incredibuild...

> Comparing CMake to cargo is like comparing fifth century fireworks to the Space Shuttle

You are wrong here. Cargo serves a set of fixed "this-is-how-to-do-it" thing. In C++ you can build anything. I do not mean it is better, but C++ software already exists and that is the solution that it works better for it. :)

> and the committee is not interested in ever working on that

https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2017/p08...

Interoperability effort for modules: https://github.com/GabrielDosReis/ipr

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

#462

Post by gkbrk » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 5:27 PM UTC

flohofwoe wrote: post #407

germandiago wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with the typical rants about C++ is that you guys are outdated. With Conan you can consume over 1,000 packages directly from build systems and with way more control than what Cargo seems to offer. Take a look. I did use it for a while and compared to 15 years ago things are way better now.

The problem isn't that Conan exists, but that other competing solutions are just as popular which results in fragmentation (for instance vcpkg, and cmake can also directly pull in external dependencies now). In the Rust world there's just Cargo.

> In the Rust world there's just Cargo.

While not nearly as popular as Cargo (due to being blessed by the core team), Rust still has multiple build tools and package managers.

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

#463

Post by ssokolow » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 7:17 PM UTC

jcranmer wrote: post #71

throw827474737 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

Must be another one of those supply chain disruptions.

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

#464

Post by MR4D » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 8:19 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #351

MR4D wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what would happen if Security became a compiler flag? For instance, just like the -O1 or -O3 flags work for optimization, something like a -S1 or -S3 would be really useful. To me, there are lots of times when I just need to get an idea into code. Then there are times when I need to make sure that code just works™. Having different compiler flags would really make that nice, and for devops, allow anything pu…

You already have them, true it is more than one and isn't bullet proof, still it is way better than not using them.

Sorry, I wasn’t as clear as I meant to be. I was specifically thinking about things like Rust lifetimes being a compiler warning level instead of an absolute.

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

#465

Post by kllrnohj » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 8:42 PM UTC

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #455

kllrnohj wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

With the new versions of the JDK I think they will. The Java Vector features will be out of incubator in the next year or so and unlike the existing Vector, it's actually useful. For context the new vector features are for SIMD support on the JVM.

I'm honestly surprised java.util.Vector still exists. It was "deprecated" in 1.2 or something like that? I guess there's no pressure to actually remove it, though.

I only know about it from dealing with J2ME crap where ArrayList wasn't available.

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

#466

Post by TJSomething » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 3:49 AM UTC

thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #216

DashAnimal wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we not with this tired joke. Yes we're talking about the company with hundreds of chat apps, but we're also talking about the 100,000+ employee company that developed and support Golang, Dart and Flutter. But ignoring all this, the GitHub page is pretty clear: "Carbon is currently an experimental project." You shouldn't have confidence that it will be supported but they are pretty clear about it, they're trying t…

>> Can we not with this tired joke. . . . You shouldn't have confidence that it will be supported . . . It is not a joke. It is a reputation that Google has earned through its actions and inactions. As shown by https://killedbygoogle.com/ and numerous desperate posts for help [1][2][3] on this and other web sites, Google's "must launch a new shiny thing" promotion culture and abysmal customer service have eroded publ…

The only comparable thing to an open source programming language on that list is AngularJS, and I wouldn't say that was killed but superceded by Angular 2 (which is also a lot better).

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

#467

Post by cobalt » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 4:42 AM UTC

moltonel3x wrote: post #446

slingnow wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think comparing the current defacto standard low-level languages (C/C++) to Rust shines any light on the issue you raised? [1] C/C++ : 6.17% Rust : 0.29% This was addressed in one of the linked sources. What would you accept as evidence, then? 1: https://www.devjobsscanner.com/blog/top-8-most-demanded-lang...

Different metrics tell a different story. For example GitHub pull requests [1] are C++: 2.60%, Rust: 2.09%, C: 1.43%, with a clear trend showing Rust ahead of C++ next year. Or you could look at the Stackoverflow survey of languages used among professionals [2], which gives C++: 20.17%, C: 16.7%, Rust: 8.8%, with rust gaining 1-2% each year. There's no best metric, they're all biased, you need to consider a few diffe…

I assume 1 is pulling only from github.com public projects. Many companies A: don't make their code public, B: probably use github enterprise/other hosted solutions (esp including not git based)

2: Also skews towards a certain demographic

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

#468

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 6:57 AM UTC

kllrnohj wrote: post #372

mkoubaa wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at smaller scale c++ than google and I found most of their proposals reasonable but undoable for practical reasons rather than first principles reasons. For instance compiler vendors who have a veto power over language changes strongly prefer not breaking ABI. ABI changes are fine if you build the world at every commit, but also if you don't have legacy. C++ users 200 years from now would most likely benefit f…

> ABI changes are fine if you build the world at every commit, but also if you don't have legacy. That's really not true and we can look at other languages to see the various amounts of un-true it is. If ABI constantly changes then what you said is possibly true, but nobody is actually proposing that. The idea instead would be breakage along a std version. Like C++23 would be an ABI break. In the same way Java has ha…

They haven't gotten along with that just fine, that GCC case is exactly what gets brought up when discussing ABI breaks, because it caused a Python 2/3 like experience around the GCC and GNU/Linux communities.

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

#469

Post by childintime » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 7:29 AM UTC

A detail that strikes me as odd, and an explicit deviation from Rust, is to indent with only 2 spaces.

Dart does the same, but its justification is the (excessive) amount of indenting going on. It's often a struggle to match indents visually.

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

#470

Post by ncmncm » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 10:54 AM UTC

tempest_ wrote: post #263

fancyfredbot wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It really depends on what bit of computer science you are learning. C++ is definitely past its prime and has been surpassed in many areas by other languages but there are still a bunch of domains where it is the primary language.

In fact there is plenty that can be expressed only in C++. A person making effective use of the power of the language finds anything else a huge step down.

Anyone not having fun when coding C++ is doing it wrong.