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21st Century C++

cacm.acm.org

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Re: 21st Century C++

#11

Post by edflsafoiewq »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #4

Something about the formatting of the code blocks used is all messed up for me. Seems to be independent on browser, happens in both Firefox and Chrome.

The code blocks aren't in a preformatted tag like 
 so the whitespace gets collapsed. It seems the intention was to turn spaces into   but however it was done was messed up because lots of spaces didn't get converted.

Re: 21st Century C++

#13

Post by breppp »

npalli wrote: post #7
Night_Thastus wrote: post #4

Something about the formatting of the code blocks used is all messed up for me. Seems to be independent on browser, happens in both Firefox and Chrome.

This is a Bjarne issue. For personal reasons he uses proportional fonts in his code blocks (in his texts) instead of monospaced and the code snippets always look bad. I guess he is stuck in his ways, just have to work around this ugly look.

Looking at how aesthetically charming the C++ syntax is, I wouldn't expect anything less than Comic Sans code blocks

Re: 21st Century C++

#14

Post by edflsafoiewq »

npalli wrote: post #7
Night_Thastus wrote: post #4

Something about the formatting of the code blocks used is all messed up for me. Seems to be independent on browser, happens in both Firefox and Chrome.

This is a Bjarne issue. For personal reasons he uses proportional fonts in his code blocks (in his texts) instead of monospaced and the code snippets always look bad. I guess he is stuck in his ways, just have to work around this ugly look.

No, the formatting was definitely botched. It should look much better than it does even in a proportional font.

Re: 21st Century C++

#15

Post by speerer »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #4

Something about the formatting of the code blocks used is all messed up for me. Seems to be independent on browser, happens in both Firefox and Chrome.

This doesn't seem to be a code blog, but a general science communication blog. The editors may not be familiar with code syntax, and may simply be using a content management system and copy-pasting from source material.

Re: 21st Century C++

#16

Post by modernerd »

I haven't read much from Bjarne but this is refreshingly self-aware and paints a hopeful path to standardize around "the good parts" of C++.

As a C++ newbie I just don't understand the recommended path I'm supposed to follow, though. It seems to be a mix of "a book of guidelines" and "a package that shows you how you should be using those guidelines via implementation of their principles".

After some digging it looks like the guidebook is the "C++ Core Guidelines":

https://isocpp.github.io/CppCoreGuidelines/CppCoreGuidelines

And I'm supposed to read that and then:

> use parts of the standard library and add a tiny library to make use of the guidelines convenient and efficient (the Guidelines Support Library, GSL).

Which seems to be this (at least Microsoft's implementation):

https://github.com/microsoft/GSL

And I'm left wondering, is this just how C++ is? Can't the language provide tooling for me to better adhere to its guidelines, bake in "blessed" features and deprecate what Bjarne calls, "the use of low-level, inefficient, and error-prone features"? I feel like these are tooling-level issues that compilers and linters and updated language versions could do more to solve.

Re: 21st Century C++

#17

Post by kstrauser »

edflsafoiewq wrote: post #14
npalli wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a Bjarne issue. For personal reasons he uses proportional fonts in his code blocks (in his texts) instead of monospaced and the code snippets always look bad. I guess he is stuck in his ways, just have to work around this ugly look.

No, the formatting was definitely botched. It should look much better than it does even in a proportional font.

Agreed. I wouldn't mind if, say, end of line comments weren't perfectly aligned. There's zero indentation so things like

     for (string line; getline(is,line); )
  s.insert(line);
are hard to visually parse.

Re: 21st Century C++

#18

Post by coffeeaddict1 »

The C++ Core Guidelines have existed for nearly 10 years now. Despite this, not a single implementation in any of the three major compilers exists that can enforce them. Profiles, which Bjarne et al have had years to work on, will not provide memory safety[0]. The C++ committee, including Bjarne Stroustrup, needs to accept that the language cannot be improved without breaking changes. However, it's already too late. Even if somehow they manage to make changes to the language that enforce memory safety, it will take a decade before the efforts propagate at the compiler level (a case in point is modules being standardised in 2020 but still not ready for use in production in any of the three major compilers).

[0] https://www.circle-lang.org/draft-profiles.html

Re: 21st Century C++

#19

Post by mmoskal »

speerer wrote: post #15
Night_Thastus wrote: post #4

Something about the formatting of the code blocks used is all messed up for me. Seems to be independent on browser, happens in both Firefox and Chrome.

This doesn't seem to be a code blog, but a general science communication blog. The editors may not be familiar with code syntax, and may simply be using a content management system and copy-pasting from source material.

> ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world's largest educational and scientific society, uniting computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field's challenges.

Most of programming language conferences are organized by ACM.

Re: 21st Century C++

#20

Post by kstrauser »

modernerd wrote: post #16

I haven't read much from Bjarne but this is refreshingly self-aware and paints a hopeful path to standardize around "the good parts" of C++. As a C++ newbie I just don't understand the recommended path I'm supposed to follow, though. It seems to be a mix of "a book of guidelines" and "a package that shows you how you should be using those guidelines via implementation of their principles". After some digging it looks…

I'm curious about that now, too. Is there the equivalent of Python's ruff or Rust's cargo clippy that can call out code that is legal and well-formed but could be better expressed another way?
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