Re: Future of C++ and Boost

From: Peter Dimov (pdimov_at_[hidden])
Date: 2022-05-06 15:03:08

Glen Fernandes wrote:
> On Fri, May 6, 2022 at 4:42 AM Peter Dimov wrote:
> >
> > > John Maddock wrote:
> > > > Personally, there's little in C++14 that makes that move
> > > > attractive for me.  C++17 yes (for if constexpr).  There may be a
> > > > few libraries which could use the enhanced constexpr support in
> > > > C++14, but otherwise I'm not sure how much practical difference this
> makes.
> > >
> > > Apart from usable constexpr, polymorphic lambdas are the other big thing.
> >
> > Oh, deduced return types, too.
> 
> Deduced return types and C++14 relaxed constexpr are of more importance to
> me than C++17 if-constexpr.
> 
> To reach more users, 14 seems more appealing than 17. Although by now the
> big distributions ship with at least GCC8 which supports most of the C++17
> core language but formally still only experimental support for the C++17
> library...

I'd say that the important standard conformance level is the compiler's default
one, because that's what all the distro's packages use (and what `b2` uses if not
given `cxxstd`, which is how Boost is being built today.)

>From this standpoint, moving to C++14 is actually easier than moving to C++11,
because the build procedure doesn't have to change (except for people still on
GCC 5 or Clang 5 who will need to add cxxstd=14 unless we make this the
default.)