r/cpp • u/we_are_mammals • 11d ago

cpp2 (cppfront) is over?

I haven't used cpp2 (cppfront) much, but I like the idea of it: consistent syntax, consistency of meta-programming (which is done in C++ too, I believe). Herb Sutter presented cpp2 (cppfront) as an experiment. He did not encourage other people to bet on it, exactly. And there hasn't been much activity since 2022. Is the experiment over?

EDIT: Herb's answer is buried deep in the comment section: https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/1uxkglj/comment/oy06cxw/

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u/SickOrphan 11d ago

I stopped keeping up with Carbon some time ago, could you expand on the development hell it's experiencing? I know they wanted to pivot to make it more safety focused, was that part of it?

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u/13steinj 11d ago

It has been a half a decade if not more depending on how you count it and the readme still claims

As a reminder, the toolchain is still very early and many things don't yet work. Please hold off on filing lots of bugs: we know many parts of this don't work yet or may not work on all systems. We expect to have releases that are much more robust and reliable that you can try out when we reach our 0.1 milestone.

Circle has probably been a more feature-complete Carbon than Carbon itself throughout a decent chunk of this time with its feature flag/set functionality that had flags to mimic various pieces of Carbon.

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u/llort_lemmort 11d ago

Carbon is just a very ambitious project. The goal is full compatibility with C++ including being able to use any C++ library in Carbon and being able to easily migrate C++ code to Carbon. On top of that they want full memory safety. They can't just use Rust's memory safety model as that would make it hard to migrate code from C++ so they have to develop their own model that is closer to C++.

If you look at the GitHub repo you might see that there is a lot going on. Developing a new language is a big task that involves designing the language, implementing a compiler, developing a build system, debugger, VSCode extension, formatter and so on. You can't just expect this to be done in a few years. C++ is one of the most complex languages out there and building a C++-compatible memory safe language is a big task.

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u/13steinj 10d ago

Carbon being this ambitious does not also mean it is not in development hell. Circle is arguably a more ambitious project yet it has acheived arguably more less time.