Dconf 2014 Day 2 Keynote: The Last Thing D Needs -- Scott Meyers

> C++ developers .. don't seem to be interested in actually improving the language In his talks at the 2014 and 2017 conferences for the D programming langue, Scott Meyers noted the difference between what individual C++ committee members say they value, and what the process actually produces. Will a new standard every three years make this better or worse? They do seem open to deprecating things that don't work. You might enjoy the 2014 talk, called "The Last Thing D Needs." I don't want to spoil the punchline, which actually struck me as kind of bittersweet, but Scott talked about the distinction that Fred Brooks made in "No Silver Bullet" between essential and accidental complexity. C++ does have a lot of the latter. Edit: link for the 2014 talk: [this video] and for the 2017 talk: [link]

I'd say a lot of this is a form of survivorship bias. I've programmed in C++ since the mid 90s so I am used to a lot of C++'s issues, but I also run a company and have to train new engineers and I see first hand the absolute nightmare that a lot of people encounter learning this language and it's demoralizing. While to me a lot of this is stuff I managed to figure out, I also understand that for many new developers this is just crap that no one should have to deal with in 2023. Lack of a good way to build third party libraries, build times that are astronomical and a true productivity killer, error messages that are entirely unhelpful and can produce giant walls of text for the most trivial of reasons, rampant undefined behavior that is incredibly hard to identify. Several things changed my view on C++ and now I see it mostly as a sort of zombie language. 1. As I mentioned once I started my own business and needed to train new engineers on how to use C++, I started to look at the language from a fresh point of view and realized it really is a complex mess just to get basic things working. 2. Scott Meyers "retiring" from C++, and in particular this video: [this video] 3. I attended an ISO C++ meeting in Toronto and while I absolutely found that the people were very intelligent and knowledgeable, as well as well intentioned, I realized just how political C++ is and that much of its development and complexity is not due to technical constraints or driven based on what is in the best

Instead of defensiveness, why not talk about the ways in which the C++ committee is changing how they're operating (or even leaving ISO) and changing their culture to shore up these things. Look at past Scott Meyers talks (e.g. [1]). He highlights how the committee has arbitrary set of principles that can be applied to justify or reject any proposal and the inconsistencies in the language are a reflection of this. This isn't a problem of the language itself but rather that it's design by committee with 4 major front-end implementations (Intel, MSVC, Clang, GCC although I believe Intel is standardizing on the Clang front-end at least). Organizational issues like that are tough to spot but it's become clear now for several years that Rust is going to beat C++ silly if the C++ committee doesn't clean up their act and steer the C++ community a bit better (e.g. still no ABI specification, no improvements on macros, no standardized build system, modules are a joke, no standardized package system, etc etc). They're not effective stewards not least of which because they can't even take good impactful ideas from Rust and copy them. [1] [this video]