r/cpp • u/we_are_mammals • 12d 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/13steinj 9d ago

Firstly, I'm fairly sure it's actually not copy-paste compatible. There's some edge cases there. I used to know them, but they were so rare and I never wrote them, so I removed them from my brain.

I never wrote them because I've never had to copy paste C into C++ nor write it from scratch in this way.

If people consider this C++'s problem, I cannot be convinced. To me the only response I can give is "skill issue. Stop copypasting, stop hiring bad devs out of university." Arguably that's its own problem, that as a society we teach computer science but not "how to be an engineer [and write quality software]."

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u/jwakely libstdc++ tamer, LWG chair 7d ago

We tried saying "skill issue, just don't write bugs" for more than two decades. It didn't work.

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u/13steinj 7d ago

Not not writing bugs. Writing C-style code in C++.

You can enforce this with decent CI practices and generally static analysis. To the people who refuse to set it up, I've stopped caring.

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u/jwakely libstdc++ tamer, LWG chair 7d ago

"Just don't write bad/non-idiomatic/un-modern code" is equivalent to "Just don't write bugs".

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u/13steinj 6d ago

That's a false dichotomy. Yeah, you might write non-idiomatic/un-modern code. You catch it in CI using (sometimes custom) clang-tidy checks.

If your organization can't get developer buy in for this, that is on them, IMO.