Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++

If you've seen this before, it's worth looking at the 2025 roadmap – it's long-term work, a full safety story hasn't been quite figured out (TBD end 2025), and 0.1 is TBD end 2026. About the pace of Rust, although without the active forum that Rust had in its early days.

https://docs.carbon-lang.dev/docs/project/roadmap.html

What _is_ interesting is that I get the impression that Carbon is being workshopped with the C++ community, rather than the wider PLT community -- I worry that they won't benefit from the broader perspectives that'll help it avoid well-known warts elsewhere.

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

#6

Post by mihaic » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 4:34 PM UTC

It's become a pet peeve of mine, but for the love of God, if anyone with input in Carbon is scanning this, what can be done to use "func" instead of "fn" as a keyword?

That all-consonant keyword always makes it seem like I'm reading Hungarian notation when reading Rust for instance. An other options I've seen for instance in Pony, "fun", is already an English word with a completely different meaning.

Even the "function" from Javascript seems fine to me.

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

#7

Post by ryanobjc » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 4:34 PM UTC

nxobject wrote: post #5

If you've seen this before, it's worth looking at the 2025 roadmap – it's long-term work, a full safety story hasn't been quite figured out (TBD end 2025), and 0.1 is TBD end 2026. About the pace of Rust, although without the active forum that Rust had in its early days. https://docs.carbon-lang.dev/docs/project/roadmap.html What _is_ interesting is that I get the impression that Carbon is being workshopped with the…

I think there are parallels with functional languages on the JVM. The parts that are the worst are the parts that were built for maximum interoperability. Not to mention that the JVM forces classes on you at the deepest opcode levels.

Compatibility with C++ is fine, but so far it seems carbon's safety story is entirely a wishlist rather than anything yet. Seems like Carbon might be a more of a place to demonstrate features for C++ committees than a real language?

Personally I have hand it up to here with lousy programmingn languages that make it easy for me to write bugs.

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

#8

Post by seanw444 » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 4:51 PM UTC

mihaic wrote: post #6

It's become a pet peeve of mine, but for the love of God, if anyone with input in Carbon is scanning this, what can be done to use "func" instead of "fn" as a keyword? That all-consonant keyword always makes it seem like I'm reading Hungarian notation when reading Rust for instance. An other options I've seen for instance in Pony, "fun", is already an English word with a completely different meaning. Even the "functi…

I kind of appreciate fn, personally. It's nice having function declaration lines with two less unnecessary characters in their length.

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

#9

Post by flohofwoe » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 4:53 PM UTC

mihaic wrote: post #6

It's become a pet peeve of mine, but for the love of God, if anyone with input in Carbon is scanning this, what can be done to use "func" instead of "fn" as a keyword? That all-consonant keyword always makes it seem like I'm reading Hungarian notation when reading Rust for instance. An other options I've seen for instance in Pony, "fun", is already an English word with a completely different meaning. Even the "functi…

Tbh, I wonder why modern languages still have a function keyword at all, e.g.:

    const add = (a: i32, b: i32): i32 => a + b;

...or any variation of the arrow-function idea...

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

#10

Post by mckravchyk » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 4:59 PM UTC

mihaic wrote: post #6

It's become a pet peeve of mine, but for the love of God, if anyone with input in Carbon is scanning this, what can be done to use "func" instead of "fn" as a keyword? That all-consonant keyword always makes it seem like I'm reading Hungarian notation when reading Rust for instance. An other options I've seen for instance in Pony, "fun", is already an English word with a completely different meaning. Even the "functi…

C++ does not have a function keyword at all, I wonder why did they add it in the first place.