The first panel from C++ and Beyond 2012 is now available on Channel 9:
On Static If, C++11 in 2012, Modern Libraries, and Metaprogramming
Andrei Alexandrescu, Scott Meyers, Herb Sutter
Channel 9 was invited to this year’s C++ and Beyond to film some sessions (that will appear on C9 over the coming months!)…
At the end of day 2, Andrei, Herb and Scott graciously agreed to spend some time discussing various modern C++ topics and, even better, answering questions from the community. In fact, the questions from Niners (and a conversation on reddit/r/cpp) drove the conversation.
Here’s what happened…
Any ETA on other sessions? Can’t wait to watch them. :)
I was interested in your comments around additions to the standard C++ library, particularly around XML where you mentioned Xerces by name. Given that Xerces implements, amongst other things like SAX, the standard DOM C++ binding I was wondering about your views on this. This binding, presumably because of it’s cross language IDL roots, does not really use much of the rest of the standard C++ library, not even std::string. Would a C++ interface such as this, which is a very well defined and documented standard, be rejected by the C++ standards committee because it doesn’t use other portions of the standard where appropriate or is this not a problem?
I ask as I’m not aware of any broadly used C++ XML library that does use the rest of the standard library, certainly not C++11 and would therefore assume that any standardization with C++ would be many years off.
Also has there been any talk between the C++ committee and W3C on this?
With regards to static loops, the reason I think these are necessary is variadic parameter packs. These are by far the ugliest and most user-unfriendly new feature in C++11. I’ve seen the implementation of std::tuple, and it is far more complex and difficult to understand then it should be for as simple a concept as tuples.. It should be possible to define operator== for tuples using a single template function, rather than the multiple specializations that are necessary today. If we had a static for loop then this would be trivial,