Re: [boost] Foundational vs non-foundational libraries (was: Re: Thoughts on Boost v2)

Subject: Re: [boost] Foundational vs non-foundational libraries (was: Re: Thoughts on Boost v2)
From: Niall Douglas (s_sourceforge_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-05-21 09:51:57

On 21 May 2014 at 13:53, Jonathan Wakely wrote:

> I still think the comparisons with C11 aren't relevant and don't help
> make your point.

Yeah, I should explain that.

One of the central tenets of my presentation at C++ Now and its 
accompanying position paper is that C++ 11/14 does not deliver much 
useful to its use case as THE systems programming language over C11. 
I posited that if you looked at the new features in C++ 11/14 which 
C11 does not have from the perspective of a Python runtime engineer, 
you saw almost zero improvements. Or, put another way, C++ 11/14's 
new features are mainly introspective and inward facing - I believe I 
used the phase "navel-gazing". My claim was that this was fine for 
one major standards release, but probably unwise for a second major 
standards release and definitely a bad idea if continued for a third.

I followed that claim with a further claim that stopping deliberately 
ignoring C++ ABI management would be a major tick in favour of C++ as 
the future systems programming language, and for that we need to 
reawaken the type export feature, and I went into some depth about 
how to do that. Otherwise it will continue to be C as people's first 
choice for new code (indeed C has always been favoured over C++ for 
new open source code), and C++ may end up turning into a Haskell 
variant used only by a specialist elite for low latency and HPC 
applications.

Hence the constant comparison with C11. Does that make sense now?

Niall

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