I’m a bit skeptical that a borrow checker in C++ can be as powerful as in rust, since C++ doesn’t have lifetime annotations. Without lifetime annotations, you have to do a whole program analysis to get the equivalent checks which isn’t even possible if you’re e.g. loading dynamic libraries, and prohibitively slow otherwise. Without that you can only really do local analysis which is of course good but not that powerful.
Lifetime annotations in the type system is the right call, since it allows library authors to impose invariants related to ownership on their consumers. I doubt C++ will add it to their typesystem though.
Read the proposal: Lifetimes annotations, the rust standard library (incl. basic types like Vec, ARc, …), first class tuples, pattern matching, destructive moves, unsafe, it is all in there.
The proposal is really to bolt on Rust to the side of C++, with all the compatibility problems that brings by necessity.
Ah ok just read the article and not the proposal. I’m surprised that they went that far but as I wrote I think that lifetime annotations are a good idea, hope the C++ people find a way to add them to the language that actually works well, which sounds like an incredibly difficult task.
Gonna need to start calling it C++++ at this point. So much extra shit in the standard library
Honestly, i prefer that over minimal standard libraries where you need dotzens of changing depencies for the simplest stuff.
Nah standard libraries are great but C++ has a lot of… cruft. Maybe don’t plonk a lot of Rust in there despite all the positives
Sure, not saying C++ isn’t cluttered.
C# be like, am i a joke to you?
I’m not sure, C# wants to hear the response to this…
C/C++ : Yeah.
I’ve done a bit of C++ coding in my time. The feature list of the language is so long at this point that it is pretty much impossible for anyone new to learn C++ and grok the design decisions anymore. I don’t know if this is a good thing or not to keep adding and extending or whether C++ should sail into the sunset like Fortran and others before it.
Fortran is still a good language for some purposes I think.
And I feel the same way, C++ tries to solve the problem of having too many features by adding more features.
… for the very reason that Fortran you can grasp in an evening.
Don’t get me wrong. There is still a time and a place for Fortran. And this will also likely always be the case for C++. But I’m not sure it is entirely wise to choose it if you’re creating a new project anymore.
You might be right, but I have heard that song a lot of times, python, java, ml, pascal, obscure webdev.languages, AI will do it, typescript, etc etc etc
I’d go with a better python than rust, you can put that “once in a lifetime asm optimized memsafe multi threaded code” in a package and just use it from python. But python has GIL and you can’t just remove it so who knows what will be the next shiny thing? Probably several languages, like for easy peasy stuff up to hardcore multi threaded memory safe stuff. Gotta push us oldtimers out in some way, right :-) ?
But python has GIL and you can’t just remove it so
https://docs.python.org/3/using/configure.html#cmdoption-disable-gil
The GIL appears to be slowly going away.
I’m barely competent at programming. What is the use case for Fortran, besides maintaining ancient code?
A lot of computational heavy tasks for science were done in Fortran at least ten years ago (and I think still are). I was told that’s mainly because Fortran has a good deal of libraries for just that, and it was widely taught in academia so this is a common ground between the older and newer generations.
I think it may be gradually superseded by Python, but I don’t know if it is
On one hand, I’m pleased that C++ is answering the call for what I’ll call “safety as default”, since as The Register and everyone else since pointed out, if safety constructs are “bolted on” like an afterthought, then of course it’s not going to have very high adoption. Contrast this to Rust and its “unsafe” keyword that marks all the places where the minimum safety of the language might not hold.
On the other hand, while this Safe C++ proposal adopts a similar notion of an “unsafe” context, it also adds a “safe” keyword, to specify that a function will conform to compile-time safety checks. But as the proposal readily admits:
Rust’s functions are safe by default. C++’s are unsafe by default.
While the proposal will surely continue to evolve before being implemented, I forsee a similar situation as in C where code that lacked initial const-correctness will struggle to work with newer code and libraries. In this case, it would be the “unsafe” keyword that proliferates everywhere just to call older, unsafe code from newer, safe callers.
Rust has the advantage that there isn’t much/any legacy Rust to upkeep, and that means the volume of unsafe code in Rust proframs is minimal, making them safer overall today. But for Safe C++ code, there’s going to be a lot of unsafe legacy C++ code and that reduces the safety benefit for programs overall, for the time being
Even as this proposal progresses, the question of whether to start rewriting some code anew in Rust remains relevant. But this is still exciting as a new option to raise the bar in memory safety in C++.
C++'s feature set follows the same rules as the Borg.
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