// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
The Two Factions of C++
The dream of a single dialect-free C++ has probably been dead for many years, anyway.
There seems to be a lot of fighting and arguing over the future of C++.
On Reddit and a certain orange website, definitely, but also surely at the official C++ standard committee
meetings. You don’t need to look very far.
EDIT (25-11-2024): Typos and phrasing. Mentioned on
HN,
r/cpp, lobste.rs.
I don’t know about you, but if I were to look at all of this as an outsider, it sure would
look as if C++ is basically falling apart, and as if a vast amount of people lost faith in the
ability of C++’s committee to somehow stay on top of this.5
Say, Google. Google evidently lost faith in ’the process’ ever since the ABI-vote. This
isn’t a loss of faith in the language itself, Google has one of the largest C++ codebases in the
world, and it has served them incredibly well. It’s a loss of faith in the language’s ability
to evolve as pressure mounts from different angles (potential government regulations, competing languages,
a desire for better performance and safety guarantees from key players, etc.).
So what’s the problem? Why doesn’t C++ just…change?
Well, figuring that out is easy. Just
look at what Herb Sutter said in his paper on profiles:
“We must minimize the need to change existing code. For adoption in existing
code, decades of experience has consistently shown that most customers with large code bases cannot and
will not change even 1% of their lines of code in order to satisfy strictness rules, not even for safety
reasons unless regulatory requirements compel them to do so.”
– Herb Sutter
Cool. Is anyone surprised by this? I don’t think so.