Peering Forward - C++’s Next Decade - Herb Sutter - CppCon 2024

Herb Sutter discusses the future of C++, focusing on compile-time reflection, safety, and major turning points in the language's evolution.

cppcon.org CppCon 2024 Early Access: cppcon.org/early-access Access All 2024 Session Videos Ahead of Their Official Release To YouTube. At least 30 days exclusive access through the Early Access system. Videos will be released to the CppCon channel on a schedule of one video per business day, with initial releases starting in November. --- Peering Forward - C++’s Next Decade - Herb Sutter - CppCon 2024 --- This is an exciting year for ISO C++: In just the past few months, it has started to become clear that C++ is approaching three major positive turning points that are starting to materialize together in a blossoming of usability we haven’t seen since C++11. First, compile-time reflection, including source generation, will dominate the next decade of C++ as arguably the most powerful feature that we’ve ever standardized, and (fingers crossed!) it’s on track for being included in C++26 in the coming months. I expect reflection’s impact on library building to be comparable to that of all the other library-building improvements combined that we’ve added since C++98. Second, memory safety is being taken seriously in WG21. After a decade or two of gradual smaller improvements, the committee is actively working toward taking the major step of enabling well-known proven-effective safety checks at compile time by default, without compromising performance. Third, simplifying C++ is being taken seriously. I’m not the only person actively proposing simplifications to C++, and I expect the rate of simplification proposal papers to increase again in the coming year as the fruits of in-the-field experiments turn into evidence that the experimental improvements are working and are ready to be considered for ISO C++ itself to benefit all programmers. Most of all, the above overlap and reinforce each other. For example, reflection will enable writing more new facilities as compile-time libraries instead of as language features that have to be baked into a compiler, which helps simplify future language evolution. Reflection will also enable compile-time libraries that let developers express their intent directly and leave it to the library code to accurately generate correct implementations, which helps reduce errors and makes our code both simpler and safer. ISO C++ has long been solidly in the top 5 programming languages and is going strong. This talk presents reasons to expect that C++’s future is bright, and that perhaps its most important decade is just ahead. --- Slides: github.com/CppCon/CppCon2024/blob/main/Presentations/Peering… Work at Hudson River Trading (HRT): tinyurl.com/safxfctf --- Herb Sutter Herb is an author, designer of several Standard C++ features, and chair of the ISO C++ committee and the Standard C++ Foundation. His current interest is simplifying C++. --- CppCon is the annual, week-long, face-to-face gathering for the entire C++ community. The conference is organize