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196 points svlasov | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.434s | source
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qalmakka ◴[] No.40853995[source]
While I love this paper and this proposal in general, as a C++ developer every time C++ adds a new major feature I get somewhat worried about two things:

1. how immense the language has become, and how hard it got to learn and implement

2. how "modernising" C++ gives developers less incentives to convince management to switch to safer languages

While I like C++ and how crazy powerful it is, I also must admit decades of using it that teaching it to new developers has become immensely hard in the last few years, and the "easier" inevitably ends up being the unsafe one (what else can you do when the language itself tells you to refrain from using `new`?).

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oldpersonintx ◴[] No.40854746[source]
There is no alternative to modernizing C and C++

Indeed I wish they were even more aggressive about breaking changes

Rust is nifty but there is simply too much existing C/C++ out there and "rewrite it in Rust" is not a serious suggestion

Maybe one day we have some cool AI that magically rewrites old C/C++ automatically, but by then I also assume we will have AI-designed languages

Until then, we need C/C++ to be maintained and modernized because we are actually running the world with these languages

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Zambyte ◴[] No.40856286[source]
Thoughts on Zig? Just not popular enough to fit the bill or are there technical reasons?

I bring it up partially because they are not taking a "rewrite it in Zig" approach, they are specifically aiming for incremental migration in mixed C / Zig codebases.

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1. pjmlp ◴[] No.40864394[source]
Zig is basically Modula-2 for C afficionados, those of us that are confortable with C++ hardly have any benefit from it, those improvements are also on C++ type system.