On Monday, 8 June 2015 at 19:47:07 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
That is why Microsoft is going forward with WinRT.
It is nice that they're updating the APIs, but I heard that a lot
of it is just wrappers around old ones. The bigger issue is that
Windows 7 and 8 (haven't tried the preview builds for 10) both
feel noticeably slower to me on the _same_ hardware than FreeBSD
or linux. I bet backwards compatibility has a part to play in
that.
On Monday, 8 June 2015 at 19:55:34 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Monday, 8 June 2015 at 19:17:03 UTC, Joakim wrote:
I wonder when they will realize that a clean break is
necessary. 36 years is far too long for a language to keep
building on top of the past. Intel has been hurt by this with
x86 recently, probably Microsoft with Windows too.
There's no point in C++ having a clean break. If you're doing
that, you might as well just create a new language like D. If
C++ had a clean break, it wouldn't be C++ anymore, and many of
the folks who continue to use C++ are the ones who want it to
be backwards compatible. Arguably, if anything, languages like
D and Rust _are_ the clean break.
They could do something like D when it jumped to 2.0, except with
better migration paths. With some careful planning and automated
source conversion tools nowadays, it doesn't have to be that bad.
The idea is you keep the C++ knowledge that is accumulated by
all those devs over the years, but make breaking changes that
allow the language to get much better and cleaner. One of the
main changes I'd pursue is getting rid of the preprocessor,
though I don't know how feasible that is.
You may be right that the C++ crowd is now mostly legacy-oriented
and wouldn't want such a change, while those who want something
different are already moving on to D and Rust, but that doesn't
speak too well for the future viability of C++. ;)
