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If C++ wants to continue evolving, it needs breaking changes. It needs to impose a migration duty to the user, but that is not going to happen. So it will die

If C++ wants to continue evolving, it needs breaking changes. It needs to impose a migration duty to the user, but that is not going to happen. So it will die a death by entropy where noone can know the language.

tempodox 3y ago
> it needs breaking changes. Then nobody will use the new compiler because nobody wants to rewrite millions of LOC and introduce new bugs.
- 29athrowaway 3y ago
  AI will do it one day.
  - layer8 3y ago
    Introduce new bugs, sure.
    - random_mutex 3y ago
      That's what will end the AI hype.
eej71 3y ago
I think the great challenge with breaking changes is demonstrating how other systems have done breaking changes with great success. They are quite rare. And no, the python2->python3 migration is not one of them. Neither is ip4->ip6.
- Sankozi 3y ago
  The important part about breaking backward compatibility is allowing forward compatibility. Java is good in that regard, for each breaking change, you could still create a library that worked for Java N and Java N+1. It is possible to have a network supporting IPv4 and IPv6. I don't think the speed of migration is an issue. It is not a tremendous success but it is not a failure either. In Python forward compatibility was often impossible. The migration benefit was low and the cost was high. Python is a great example how not to break things. I am little surprised that whole language is still popular after such failure of leadership.
Const-me 3y ago
> that is not going to happen It’s even worse. They happily introduce breaking changes for some things, but not others. I have once wasted days of work updating a codebase to build with C++/20 because the new standard suddenly changed the type returned by `u8` string literals (available for a decade already, it was introduced in C++/11) from const char* into const char8_t*, and they made these types incompatible.

tempodox 3y ago

> it needs breaking changes. Then nobody will use the new compiler because nobody wants to rewrite millions of LOC and introduce new bugs.

29athrowaway 3y ago
AI will do it one day.
- layer8 3y ago
  Introduce new bugs, sure.
  - random_mutex 3y ago
    That's what will end the AI hype.

eej71 3y ago

I think the great challenge with breaking changes is demonstrating how other systems have done breaking changes with great success. They are quite rare. And no, the python2->python3 migration is not one of them. Neither is ip4->ip6.

Sankozi 3y ago
The important part about breaking backward compatibility is allowing forward compatibility. Java is good in that regard, for each breaking change, you could still create a library that worked for Java N and Java N+1. It is possible to have a network supporting IPv4 and IPv6. I don't think the speed of migration is an issue. It is not a tremendous success but it is not a failure either. In Python forward compatibility was often impossible. The migration benefit was low and the cost was high. Python is a great example how not to break things. I am little surprised that whole language is still popular after such failure of leadership.

Const-me 3y ago

> that is not going to happen It’s even worse. They happily introduce breaking changes for some things, but not others. I have once wasted days of work updating a codebase to build with C++/20 because the new standard suddenly changed the type returned by `u8` string literals (available for a decade already, it was introduced in C++/11) from const char* into const char8_t*, and they made these types incompatible.