Blog Posts about C/C++

On 2nd December Bjarne Stroustrup delivered a talk about the standardization process of C++0x at the Stevens institute. Here some of the key points from his talk.

The minutes from the Santa Cruz (October 2009) meeting are available here. Even if you're not a language layer at heart, I encourage you to read them.

In August I dedicated a series to the debate about C++0x attributes. I believe that it covered the subject in a balanced and detailed way, but I keep getting complaints from C++ users who don't like attributes for various reasons. Here's a recent email I received from a Polish C++ programmer. While it  doesn't represent my opinion about attributes -- I'm rather neutral about this feature and consider it a "solution waiting for a problem" -- but it suggests that attributes are still a highly controversial issue that will haunt C++ for a long time. The email is quoted here with minor edits that and as usual, with all private details removed.

Almost a year ago, I posted here The Web 2.0 Guy I Ain't. People wonder whether I still resist all those Web 2.0 features and technologies at the end of 2009.

Operator sizeof and typedef are among the first features that new language designers omit from their new born baby with curly braces to make a point: "this isn't yet another C++ clone". We're lucky to have them in C and C++, though.

People ask me for my opinion about attributes. Unlike with concepts (and several other harmful features that I've criticized before), I'm quite neutral about attributes. I don't think they're the best feature of C++0x nor are they the most sought-after feature but they certainly have the potential of solving certain programming issues that have hitherto been too loosely defined in the Standard, e.g., alignment.  

A lot has been said and written about the C++ standards committee decision to remove concepts from C++0x. I was among the first to report it on Informit and on other sites but recently several other independent accounts have been posted. "What happened in Frankfurt" by Douglas Gregor is one of the best reports about this issue because Gregor downplay or hide the disagreements and technical problems that arose prior to the decision to remove concepts.  

We recently sat down with several top Objective-C and Cocoa developers to talk about that state of the iPhone and OS X markets as we approach this year's WWDC.  As we were wrapping up, we threw one last question at them out of curiosity, and we thought you'd like to see what some of them said.

Traenk relates his past experience with Operating Systems that goes back 25 years, ok, more than that but he ain't tellin'

With all due modesty, I believe that the first article to recognize the potential of local classes in C++ was a C++ 10 Minute Solution from 2004 which introduced the "disposable classes" idiom. Prior to that article, local classes were merely a recondite curiosity in the C++98 standard. What's so special about local classes then? Local classes have served C++ twice: in refuting the claim that C++ needed to import finally and later, in the design of C++09 lambdas.

Traenk ruminates over what's likely to hit security professionals in the coming year.

Not many programming languages support three storage types; even among the ones that do, very few allow the programmer to control precisely which type of storage will be used, for every variable and object. This diversity comes at a price: C++ memory management is hard to teach and learn, and it imposes more responsibility on the shoulders of the programmer. But this storage types diversity is also one of C++'s strengths. Without this diversity C++ wouldn't be C++ -- the C++ I like, that is.