Episode 159: C++0X with Scott Meyers

C++ is awsome, like a swiss army chain saw. It now has lots more cool use full features that can allow you to write more elegent code, more quickly.

The only problem I have with C++ is the size, and the belef that it is just C with a few bits added. We find it nearly imposable to hire people that know C++; It is easy to find people that say they know it, but don’t. I have only met a 3 or 4 people who know this language ( none 100% ).

In future projects we are going to use Eiffel, it has the power of C++ but without the complexity. It also lets you implement methods in C (or C++), so you can get control when you need it such as device drivers. But it gives you easy-to-use / powerful / safe — generics(templates), multiple inheritence, uniform access, uniform initialisation, tuples, agents (lambdas), type safe, void safe, co-variant return types, configerable garbage collection…..

A great interview, but with one small issue – the discussion about parameter type inference was muddled and I don’t know if Scott understood fully what was said.

Frankly, in order to get argument type inference with a language like C++, I’m pretty sure you’d have to have structural types like O’Caml, so that the programmer and the compiler have a way of “pulling base classes out of thin air.” For example (this may be mangled):

int foo(x) { return x * 2; }

This would mean that the type of x is an object which has a * operator, which takes a an integer and returns an integer. Lacking concepts, I’m not sure that C++ can represent a type like that.

Nice, Just finished listening to the Software Engineering radio podcast interview with Scott Meyers regarding C++0x. Most of the new features made sense to me, and I am actually excited about C++0x

awsome, like a swiss army chain saw. It now has lots more cool use full features that can allow you to write more elegent code, more quickly.