lenkite 3 days ago

Even the wizards are moving to Rust/Zig since C++ stdlib performance is becoming terrible thanks to the ABI-frozen till heat-death of the universe decision. Even wizards don't want to build a stdlib of their own from scratch.

Feel the committee was smoking weed that day in la-la land. You can ignore all the safety stuff from Sean Baxter, but saying no to performance on the altar of permanent, un-specified ABI backward compatibility - when such was never mentioned as a design goal of C++ - means its "Goodbye C++" for a long, long list of orgs and "wizards". The ABI was NEVER specified formally by the C++ standard - so why bother sacrificing the world for its immortal existence ?

C++ is NO longer the choice of language for greenfield native projects and the committee takes the full blame.

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asyx 3 days ago

Really looking forward to zig 1.0. I feel like C++ has become a language where professionals are fine with the historical grime but for hobbyist and people that need C++ occasionally there is just no motivation in the community to make this language more ergonomic.

physicsguy 2 days ago

ABI compatibility is one of those things that is necessary with such a long history, especially with commercial libraries that don't really have an equivalent in the newer languages. The issue with C++ that doesn't exist with it's competitors is that there is a long tail of software people use commercially that isn't source available that's incredibly important in certain use cases.

I worked in a previous role on C++ CAD/simulation software that required vendored things like solid modelling kernels and it was incredibly painful. Occasionally one of the vendors would just not do the work and you'd end up having to spend half a year ripping out the dependency that worked perfectly well. The team working on the software were generally in favour of moving up through to modern standards, while I was there we did 03 -> 17 for e.g. but that didn't finish til 4 years after the C++17 standard came out for all sorts of reasons. When VS2017 came out everyone breathed a sigh of relief because suddenly we didn't have to wait to upgrade the compiler.