EmptyCrate Software. Travel. Stuff.

Considering the number of articles and polls we come across asking if C++ is dying or dead combined with the decrease in C++ job posting I have personally noticed, C++ sure is alive and well in the AI frontier.

C++ takes or ties the top 27 places at the 2010 Google AI Challenge

In the context of the rest of the Nobody Understands C++ series, I feel like this one is redundant. But it seems like it needs to be said.

C++ is not an object oriented programming language. C++ is a multi-paradigm language that supports most of the major programming paradigms that have been widely accepted.

Specifically, C++ supports:

As others have pointed out, the Final Committee Draft (FCD) of the next C++ standard is now available for anyone to download.

GCC 4.5.0 has frozen and the release has made it to the front page. This is significant to me for 2 main reasons.

1. Faster Template Compiles

A major side project of mine, ChaiScript suffers from extremely long compile times. Part of the reason is because of 1000's of templates being instantiated for even the simplest project.

This past Saturday I attended the Developer Day meeting in Boulder, CO. Overall the day was beneficial and interesting even tho it was more dynamic languages centric and very few things applied directly to my C++ development.

I did present ChaiScript during a lightning talk. I'm not sure if I said anything coherent or not but a couple of people chatted with me about it afterward, so I guess it wasn't horrible.

I was recently at a talk where the speaker was discussing the history of C++. He argued that one problem with C++ was that its design requirements included backward compatibility with C code, and one fallout of this was the requirement to support all previous types of error handling as well as adding exceptions. That is, C++ supports:

1. Returning of error codes.
2. Error handling functions.
3. Exception handling.

It is true that C++ supports all 3 of these mechanisms, as well as some other cruft left behind from C that unnecessarily encumbers the language. The speaker's point on this one particular case, however, is lost to the fact that every language supports the first two.