Herb Sutter: C++ Questions and Answers

Regarding cpp prine. Why dont you make compiler compile depending on the file extansion... just please dont make it cppp :D
So for .cpp compiler does this, for .cppprime compiler does that. Ofc just having a new language would be simpler, but breaking the compatibility would be baaad.

Great interview. Regarding the MS C++ coding standards - I can see that generating a new formatting war in various circles. But, I would still read it! Regarding the time frame for the standardization, the result is nice, but such lengths have caused a perception of a dying or obsolete language. That perception, along with MS emphasis on .NET has lead to many 'leaving' c++ or feeling the need to migrate their code at great expense to .NET/WPF with very little to gain except that new hires are more able to come aboard because they see us 'keeping up' with the latest technology. Too bad this 'c++ renaissance' has to take place. Ideally no renaissance should have to be necessary if the language and framework updating and focus is timely.

Thanks, for that Herb and Charles.

Remaining questions:

Herb, what do you actually do at Microsoft? Do you work with the compiler team? C++ usage across the organization? With the parallel processing team? All of the above?

What sort of work/studying have you done in the past that prepared you for your job now?

I'm Cory.  Thanks for answering most of my questions, Herb.  I asked all of them in the reference of C++ standardization, not in terms of Microsoft's tools, so I'm glad you picked up on that.  Sorry if there was any confusion with my short statement-questions

Happy to hear that concepts and polymorphic functions are still on the plate.  Thanks for all your hard work -- looking forward to playing with it when compilers catch up.

Thank you for a great talk! I am glad my modules/templates question made it in :)

So, the proposed module would allow people to expose basically "C with classes" code, which is far from what can be done in complete modern C++. You briefly mentioned template instantiation - is there something I can read about that idea? I am just trying to understand - how could you ever expose something like standard containers from a module (or instantiate it beforehand)? That code is parameterized to the the concrete type and then machine code (or some intermediate representation) is emitted. In either case, I think the compiler will need source code, or you else you are talking about some kind of separately and completely compiled "generic" that lives in a lib and gets dynamically linked (ie not part of this compilation).

Does this make sense or am off?

Thanks!

Now I found http://herbsutter.com/ and http://www.gotw.ca/

Thanks Herb!

There is at least a candidate for a portable systems language that is type and memory safe and comes quite close to C/C++ performance
ATS http://www.ats-lang.org/ 
http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Paper/6926597
Maybe an Expert to Expert episode with Erik and Herb?

 

Always love hearing Herb's (and STL's) insights into the standardisation process and the design planning behind C++.

I'll also add a vote for an Erik/Herb E2E, even though I can probably guess the plot (Erik says C++ is trying to be more like Haskell, Herb agrees but is defensive about the implied charge of plagiarism, Erik gives contrived examples, Herb gives other examples, Erik backs down and they all lived happily ever after. Better than Hollywood!)

I am facing a big problem downloading the video. The download starts up fine, but then slowly the speed goes to zero. I have to stop and resume the download to get it to start again :(.

@Charles: Hah, you're right. How could I forget that. *goes to see whether my prediction was a suppressed memory*

Could we please have transcripts for these discussions? 600MB for each is a bit too much.

I was looking forward to reading Herb's answers to the questions on this page. The instruction to do so says "click the question link for Herb's answer". However, clicking any of the questions simply navigates to the top of the page and no answer is revealed.

I'm using Firefox 5.0, one of the most popular (and standard-adherent) browsers around.

I know Microsoft have a history of ignoring web standards but, for heaven's sake, this is one of the simplest tasks to code on a web page. Please fix it so that I may read Herb's responses.

1 day ago

I'm using Firefox 5.0, one of the most popular (and standard-adherent) browsers around.

Your precious FX5 does not adhere to the H.264 standard.

@OS guest:Code and data (like std::cout) in libraries are fully instantiated.

I have to take exception to the explanation of why we don't have polymorphic lambdas. It wasn't a consistency problem or because the committee was too scared of implicit templates. It was because nobody knew how to get them to work inside concepts-constrained templates (because the lambdas would be unconstrained). At the time, concepts were an approved part of the standard. Once concepts were taken out, it was too late to reintroduce polymorphic lambdas, but even if it weren't, I doubt anyone who hopes for a future standard with concepts would have pushed to reintroduce them.

[I think I have a solution for the problem of interoperating between constrained and unconstrained templates now, but at the time it was an unsolved problem.]

Modules and shared libraries are not really related as far as I can tell. Pete Becker was working on shared libraries, but that's a separate issue from modules. The point of (Daveed's) modules design is obsoleting the #include model, which makes it so difficult for us to do so many things well in c++.

Also, I'm confident that making modules work with templates can be far easier than implementing export, which was "designed" in a hurry with no implementation experience and don't have the same information-hiding capability.