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This is a really great idea, specially if you can write a transpiler from general C++ into modified C++ (it can error out on corner cases and ask for manual int

This is a really great idea, specially if you can write a transpiler from general C++ into modified C++ (it can error out on corner cases and ask for manual intervention, but trivial stuff like adding missing braces can and should be done by an automatic tool, like rustfix is used to migrate between Rust editions https://github.com/rust-lang/rustfix https://github.com/rust-lang/rustfix) But here you didn't tackle the main thing: a plan to make simple business logic not corrupt memory and cause havok with UB! Dereferencing arbitrary pointers is a dangerous operation that shouldn't be done in everyday code. If I'm writing data structures I'm willing to think about UB, but if I'm choosing the color of a widget I'm less so. I'm not expecting you solve this hard problem, but at least a general direction or a half solution that works for a % of the cases would be cool (or at least state this is a long term goal). And of course there's the comparison to Rust, but Rust is actually just a data point in this solution space and perhaps new languages can afford to try new approaches

compiler-devel 4y ago
Great suggestions all around. UB is a beast of a problem and compilers take advantage of UB for optimizations (some going so far as to break programmers' code).
mxmlnkn 4y ago
Clang-tidy can detect some of the "Modified C++" constraints like no implicit conversions to bool and can even suggest automatic fixes and also apply them with clang-apply-replacements. Clang-tidy is already a transpiler for "Modified C++".
- compiler-devel 4y ago
  Indeed. I conceded in my commit message that a linter or checker (such as clang-tidy) could be used to implement some or most of what I suggested (but not the mutable/const change of course). Aside from learning more about how clang works, I wanted to show that we can (and should?) modify the language. There appears to be inertia to drop legacy at the committee level. C++ needs a Snow Leopard release to do some of what I've done here.

compiler-devel 4y ago

Great suggestions all around. UB is a beast of a problem and compilers take advantage of UB for optimizations (some going so far as to break programmers' code).

mxmlnkn 4y ago

Clang-tidy can detect some of the "Modified C++" constraints like no implicit conversions to bool and can even suggest automatic fixes and also apply them with clang-apply-replacements. Clang-tidy is already a transpiler for "Modified C++".

compiler-devel 4y ago
Indeed. I conceded in my commit message that a linter or checker (such as clang-tidy) could be used to implement some or most of what I suggested (but not the mutable/const change of course). Aside from learning more about how clang works, I wanted to show that we can (and should?) modify the language. There appears to be inertia to drop legacy at the committee level. C++ needs a Snow Leopard release to do some of what I've done here.