A few days ago I recorded CppCast episode 357. Thanks to Timur Doumler and Phil Nash for inviting me on their show – and for continuing CppCast, which was so wonderfully founded by Rob Irving and Jason Turner!
This time, we chatted about news in the C++ world, and then about my Cpp2 and cppfront experimental work.
The podcast doesn’t seem to have chapters, but here are a few of my own notes about sections of interest:
- 00:00 Intro
- 04:30 News: LLVM 16.0.0, “C++ Initialisation” book, new user groups
- 15:45 Start of interview
- 16:08 Why I don’t view Cpp2 as a “successor language”
- 16:25 A transpiler is a compiler (see also: cfront, PyPy, TypeScript, …)
- 17:20 Origins of the Cpp2 project, 2015/16
- 19:00 100% compatibility as a primary goal and design constraint
- 22:00 Avoid divergence, continue in same path C++ is already going
- 22:50 What compatibility means: 100% link compat always on, 100% source compat always available but pay only if you need it
- 24:14 Making the syntax unique in a simple way, start with “name :”
- 28:10 Avoid divergence and still make a major simplification, by letting programmers directly declare their intent
- 30:30 Bringing the pieces to ISO and the community for feedback
- 31:55 What about “epochs”/“editions”? tl;dr: It’s exactly the right question, but I think the right answer is “epoch” (singular)
- 35:42 C++ is popular and will endure no matter what we do; question is can we make it nicer
- 37:05 My personal experiment, and others are now helping
- 38:20 What “safeties” I’m targeting, and what degree of safety, and why formally provable guarantees are nice but neither necessary nor sufficient (I expect this view to be controversial)
- 44:00 The issue is making things 50x (98%) safer, vs. 100% safer, because what does requiring that last 2% actually cost the design in incompatibility / difficulty of use
- 47:05 The zero-overhead principle is non-negotiable, and so is always being able to “open the hood” to take control, otherwise it’s not C++ anymore
- 48:20 Examples: dynamic bounds/null checking is opt-out, now the default but still pay for it only if you use it
- 50:20 Will cppfront support all major compilers and platforms? It already does, any reasonably conforming C++20 compiler (any gcc/clang/msvc since about 2020), and that will continue
- 52:15 Keeping the generated source code very close to the original is a priority
- 53:25 “TypeScript for C++” plan vs. “Dart for C++” plan
- 55:20 TypeScript did what Bjarne’s cfront did: Transpiler that let you always keep your generated JavaScript/C code, so you could drop using the new language anytime if you want with #NoRegrets, risk-free
- 57:20 Shout out to Anders Hejlsberg, IIRC the only human to produce a million-user programming language more than once, and his approach to TypeScript vs. C#
- 59:20 Why generating C++ code isn’t in tension with the goal of compatibility (it’s actually synergistic), and the targeted subset is C++20 (with a workaround only when modules are not yet available on a given compiler)
- 1:00:40 Why C++20 is super important (if constexpr, requires-expressions)
- 1:01:40 Why any C++ evolution/successor language attempt that for now only tries to be compatible with C++17 faces a big hill/disadvantage
- 1:02:40 What’s next for Cpp2 and cppfront
- 1:05:35 Where can people learn more: cppfront repo, CppCon 2022 talk, C++Now talk coming up in a month, then CppCon 2023 in October
- 1:07:28 C++ world is alive and well and thriving, now embracing challenges like safety to keep C++ working well for all of us
In at least one place I said “cppfront” where I meant “cfront”… I think the intent should be clear from context. 😉
Thanks again to everyone who has helped me personally with cppfront through issues and PRs, and to all the good folks who helped the entire C++ world by working hard and creatively through the pandemic and shipping another solid release of C++ in C++23.
Sutter’s Mill 