21–30 of 281 posts
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.
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 still feel the sting of being bit by C++ features from the 1990s that turned out to be footguns.
Honestly, I kinda like the idea of "wrapper" languages. Typescript/Kotlin/Carbon.
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.…
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?
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 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.…
While I agree with this in a general sense, I think it ought to be quite possible to come up with a "profile" spec that's simply meant to enforce the language restriction/subsetting part of Safe C++ - meaning only the essentials of the safety checking mechanism, including the use of the borrow checker. Of course, this would not be very useful on its own without the language and library extensions that the broader Safe C++ proposal is also concerned with. It's not clear as of yet if these can be listed as part of the same "profile" specifications or would require separate proposals of their own. But this may well be a viable approach.
Modules sound cool for compile time, but do they prevent duplicative template instantiations? Because that's the real performance killer in my experience.
(It's a great post in general. N.B. that it's also quite old and export templates have been removed from the standard for quite some time after compiler writers refused to implement them.)
TL;DR: Declare your templates in a header, implement them in a source file, and explicitly instantiate them inside that same source file for every type that you want to be able to use them with. You lose expressiveness but gain compilation speed because the template is guaranteed to be compiled exactly once for each instantiation.
Modules sound cool for compile time, but do they prevent duplicative template instantiations? Because that's the real performance killer in my experience.
The best way that I know of to do this is the """ "Manual" export templates """ idea discussed here: http://warp.povusers.org/programming/export_templates.html (It's a great post in general. N.B. that it's also quite old and export templates have been removed from the standard for quite some time after compiler writers refused to implement them.) TL;DR: Declare your templates in a header, implement them in a source f…
Or more, correctly, the following happens:
1. You gain the ability to use the compilation unit's anonymous namespace instead of a detail namespace, so there is better encapsulation of implementation details. The post author stresses this as the actual benefit of export templates, rather than compile times.
2. You lose the ability to instantiate the template for arbitrary types, so this is probably a no-go for libraries.
3. Your template is guaranteed to be compiled exactly once for each explicit instantiation. (Which was never actually guaranteed for real export templates).
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.…
I would never expect our 10M+ LOC performance-sensive C++ code base to be formally memory safe, but so far only C++ allowed us to maintain it for 15 years with partial refactor and minimal upgrade pain.
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.
There’s a better formatted PDF on Stroustrup’s website: https://stroustrup.com/21st-Century-C++.pdf .