Thoughts on Modern C++ and Game Dev

> It seems that the people who are supposed to be speaking for the regular programmers aren't doing a particularly good job.

I agree with this. The people at CppCon are very smart, very informed, and very very pro-C++. It's silly to think that such a person (people on the committee, no less), would be a good spokesperson for your everyday programmer.

However, that's certainly not the main problem keeping C++ complexity high. Even though the committee genuinely wants improvement in this area, there is too much fear of breaking legacy code, and too many early design mistakes to overcome on the path back to a simpler C++.

Inaccuracies that could have been corrected by watching freely available CppCon videos:

- Papers "written in a way that's deliberately inaccessible"

- "I'd be marginalized for not using template metaprogramming" - a major topic is how to get the benefits of template metaprogramming techniques without the ugly syntax that everyone dislikes.

- "I'd be marginalized for ... not knowing the new hotness by heart" - a major purpose of CppCon talks is to explain the new hotness.

- "it's led by academics who think the concerns of working programmers like me are beneath them" - the majority of speakers at CppCon and members of the standards committee are working programmers, not academics and none of them show any evidence of thinking the concerns of working programmers are beneath them, quite the opposite in fact.

And unicode is still insanely complex.

None of those is a statement about C++. They’re all fairly subjective statements about people’s thoughts and motivations. You may disagree with them, but you can’t seriously suggest that these statements are a fair basis on which to conclude that arandr0x is too ignorant of C++ to contribute to any discussion about the language.

It's particularly discouraging to see you use someone's understandable nervousness about attending a conference as a basis to attack them for their "ignorance". Ironically, that just confirms that arandr0x is right to be a little nervous!

If you transpose your attitudes to the complexity of C++ and the complexity of unicode (“you suck because you don’t understand C++” vs. “unicode sucks because I don’t understand it”), then you might see what arandr0x is getting at.

In my experience C++ may seem more complex to understand initially than something like Python but once you invest some time to really understand it then it is much less mysterious / less of a black box than an interpreted or JITed language, particularly when dealing with anything performance sensitive, because nothing is hidden from you under layers of abstraction that persist at runtime yet are relatively opaque to your debugging or profiling tools.

One of the nice features about C++ IMO is that there is very little "magic" in the standard library. Unlike some languages, all the features of the standard library can be implemented with standard language facilities that are available to you for use in your own code. Some of the more complex areas of the language however are there primarily to support library authors writing very general code and you don't need to fully grok them to be an effective user of the language. Learning about some of them over time however will likely pay dividends for your own code even if you are not writing widely used libraries.

It's nice to hear this kind of concerns; don't be afraid! At last, C++ committee members are just people like you, hopefully nicer than expectation.

> I find reading C++ "standards" papers onerous and feel like they're written in a way that's deliberately inaccessible.

Sadly, it's somehow true; standard wordings are typically not readable for laypeople because its primary purpose is unambiguous specification but not education. Generally, I find that it's a good idea to avoid "wording for ~~" proposals if I haven't followed that specific line of proposals from its beginning.

But many proposals are still fairly readable technical papers; for instance, Herb Sutter's proposals are generally easy to follow. (ex. https://wg21.link/P0709)

> I feel like I'd be marginalized for not using template metaprogramming, not knowing the new hotness by heart, and generally being a proponent of C-with-classes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc

Don't worry. Mike Acton is not known to be a strong proponent of "Modern C++", but his session[1] is one of the most popular CppCon video on Youtube. Even if you don't like templates, people will generally respect you.

> I just feel like so much of the C++ "standards" work feels like it's led by academics who think the concerns of working programmers like me are beneath them.

http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2018/n479...

You can find the list of the participants for the last meeting. Most of them are just engineers and even Bjarne is now working for Morgan Stanley (I think most of "designed by Ivory Tower" concerns can be generally credited to Bjarne being a professor before) They're just writing C++ code as their daily job like you (and very likely suffering from C++ as well). That's why they're writing proposals to improve the language.

Some tangential story: except for few exceptions, PL academics are generally not working on languages like C++ because it typically doesn't align well with their interests. Usually they tend to use more elegant, academic friendly languages like Haskell or ML. Or even fancier languages like Coq, Adga, Idris, depending on topics. Or design their own languages. For formal verification researches, maybe C or Java. But C++ is typically considered as a complex, inelegant beast for researches.