I’ve been working on an experimental new C++ language feature tentatively called “metaclasses” that aims to make C++ programming both more powerful and simpler. You can find out about it here:

• Current proposal paper: P0707R1. I hope the first ten pages give a readable motivation and overview. (The best two pages to start with are 9 and 10, which probably means I need to reorder the paper…)
• Initial intro talk video: ACCU 2017 (YouTube). This is the initial public presentation three months ago. Thank you to Roger Orr, Russel Winder, Julie Archer, and the other ACCU organizers for inviting me and for holding back the video until we could have the ISO C++ summer meeting about a week ago, so it could go live along with a report (herein) on the results of this feature’s first presentation to the ISO C++ committee. And special thanks to Ina and Arvid, the two audience volunteers who graciously agreed to come on-stage to participate in a live mini UX study. There’s a lot of subtle information in their nuanced reactions to the code examples; pay special attention when their responses are different or as their responses evolve.
• “Incomplete and experimental” prototype compiler. The Clang-based prototype by Andrew Sutton is available as an online live compiler at cppx.godbolt.org, and as source at github.com/asutton/clang. It’s incomplete but can compile a number of the examples in the paper (see the paper for example code links). Thanks to Matt Godbolt for hosting it on godbolt.org!

Please see the paper and video to answer “what are metaclasses and why should I care?” If you’re the “show me code first, English later” kind of person, try the live compiler and these quick examples: interface, base_class, value (regular type), plain_struct (these links are also in the paper).

The rest of this post aims not to duplicate any information above, but to provide some context about the broader journey, and what I and others are attempting to accomplish.

A journey: Toward more powerful and simpler C++ programming

Phase 1: By using the existing language better

About five years ago, I started working on long-term effort toward making using C++ simpler and safer.

In the first phase, a small group of us—centered on Bjarne Stroustrup, Gabriel Dos Reis, Neil MacIntosh and Andrew Pardoe—pushed to see how far we could get with “C++ as it is” plus just a few well-chosen library-only extensions, with a particular goal of improving type and memory safety. Bjarne, Neil, and I first publicly reported on this effort in the two CppCon 2015 plenary sessions “Writing Good C++14” and “Writing Good C++14… By Default.” The results of that work so far have manifested as the C++ Core Guidelines and its support library GSL that adds a limited number of library types (e.g., span, now being standardized); and I led the Lifetime design in particular (available in the Guidelines /docs folder) which Neil and I and others continue to work on formalizing with the aim of sharing a “draft” static analysis spec later this year.

One of the goals of this phase was to answer the question: “How much progress can we make toward simplifying the existing C++ language with only a few key library extensions?” The answer as I see it turned out to be: “Some solid progress, but probably not a major simplification.” And so that answer led to phase two…

Phase 2: By evolving the language

Two years ago, I started to focus specifically on exploring ways that we might evolve the C++ language itself to make C++ programming both more powerful and simpler. The only way to accomplish both of those goals at the same time is by adding abstractions that let programmers directly express their intent—to elevate comments and documentation to testable code, and elevate coding patterns and idioms into compiler-checkable declarations. The work came up with several potential candidate features where judiciously adding some power to the language could simplify code dramatically.

Of those potential candidate features, metaclasses is the first major piece I picked to propose for ISO C++. [*] We presented it for the first time at the summer ISO C++ meeting earlier this month, and it received a warm reception. There was (rare) unanimous support for pursuing this kind of capability, but also some concern about how best to expose it and specific design change feedback the committee wants us to apply to improve the proposal. [**] We’ll work to include in a revision for the November standards meeting as we start the multi-year process of vetting and refining the proposal. So this is good progress, but note that it (only) means encouragement to continue the experiment and see where it leads; it’s far too early to talk about potential ship vehicles.

So do expect change: The proposal is still evolving, and it in turn assumes and builds on the static reflection proposal (P0578 et al.) and the compile-time programming proposal (P0633), both of which are actively evolving in their own right. Incidentally, one of the contributions of Andrew Sutton’s prototype metaclasses compiler is that it is implementing those other proposals too(!), since the metaclasses feature needs them. The aim is to keep the latest compiler and the latest P0707 paper in sync with each other and with those related proposals, but there will doubtless be occasional drift in between syncs.

What’s next

I’ll talk about metaclasses more in my upcoming CppCon 2017 talk this September, and Andrew Sutton will also be giving two CppCon talks about metaclasses—one about implementing them in Clang, and one about using them for a real project.

This is just the beginning, and we’ll see whether it all pans out and leads somewhere, but I hope you enjoy this exploration and I look forward to talking with many of you about it at CppCon this September.

 

———

Notes

[*] I actually brought a smaller piece from this same work to the committee at the previous meeting, the winter meeting in Kona: P0515 (consistent comparisons), which proposes adding the three-way <=> comparison operator. P0515 is only about a minor feature, and not one of the most important things that can help improve C++, so normally I wouldn’t have picked that piece to contribute first; but the committee was already continuing to actively discuss comparisons, so I cherry-picked it from my design work and contributed it since I had the design in my pocket anyway. Happily the committee liked what they saw and both EWG and LEWG accepted it, and it is now progressing well and on track to hopefully be voted into draft C++20 in the next meeting or two. Thanks to Jens Maurer and Walter Brown for the heavy lifting of writing the core language and library standardese wording, respectively, for that P0515 proposal.

[**] The committee’s design feedback was primarily about how to wrap up the transformation code: Instead of putting it inside a new “meta” class-like abstraction, how about wrapping the same code inside a compile-time function-like abstraction that takes an input meta::type parameter and returns a generated meta::type return value? This doesn’t affect the proposal’s basic engine, just the shape of its steering wheel—for example, we could change the first line of each example metaclass definition from the class-like syntax

$class interface {
    constexpr {
        // … basically same code …
    }
};

to the decorator-function-like syntax

meta::type interface(const meta::type source) {
    // … basically same code …
};

where the latter has the advantage that it’s easy to see that we’re reading one type and generating another type. Interestingly, I think this dovetails with the mini UX study in the video where most of the difficulty the UX participants seemed to encounter was in understanding the $class syntax, not the metaclass bodies and not later using the metaclasses to author new types.

But we’ll explore this and other options and validate/invalidate it with more experiments… and feel free to express your thoughts in the comments if you like one of these styles better, or perhaps another variation.

[This post will be updated with additional details as mentioned in the comments section at bottom.]

A few minutes ago, the ISO C++ committee completed its summer meeting in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. We had some 120 people at the meeting, representing nine national bodies. As usual, we met for six days Monday through Saturday, including several evenings.

The following are some highlights of what we achieved this week. You can find a brief summary of ISO procedures here. The main things to note are:

• “IS” means “international standard.” In our case, it’s the core C++ standard itself. Think of this as “trunk.”
• “TS” means “technical specification,” a document separate from the main standard where we can gain experience with new features before putting them into the IS. We have several of these, summarized on the status page. Think of these as “beta branches.”

Note: As I reported in my previous trip report for the winter meeting (Kona 2017), we have already completed our work on C++17, which is now still going through its final ISO approval steps. Nothing we did this week affects C++17, but we did begin work on C++20…

First meeting for C++20

This was the first meeting where we could vote changes into Draft C++20. And we did!

First, the Concepts TS was merged into draft C++20. Yes, Concepts are back in the draft international standard and better than C++0x, which makes the famous concepts feature (principally driven by Bjarne Stroustrup, Gabriel Dos Reis, and Andrew Sutton) the first major language feature voted into draft C++20. Recall that Concepts was published as a separate TS two years ago, and available in GCC; today we voted to adopt nearly of it, except only the “introducer syntax” and “terse/natural syntax” for now because that syntax still has a handful of remaining issues that don’t have consensus, but it’s close and Evolution also voted unanimously to aggressively pursue adding the terse syntax as soon as possible once those design questions can be addressed. A few specific Concepts changes were also approved along with the merge, notably removing the need to write “bool” and removing function concepts until we see a need to overload concepts.

Here are some other features that were added to C++20 at this meeting. Note: These links currently find the most recent pre-meeting papers and so may not reflect the exact wording adopted at the meeting, but the links will light up to the post-meeting versions of the papers that were actually adopted as soon as those are available in the post-meeting mailing about three weeks from now.

• Allow lambda capture [=, this]. Mostly a style issue, but it extends the legal syntax for C++17’s capture of “this” so that programmers can write this stylistically if they want to be explicit in their code.
• Add designated initializers. Draft C++20 now allows code like: struct A { int x; int y; int z; }; A b{.x = 1, .z = 2};
• Allow template parameter lists on lambdas. For example: auto f = []<typename T>(std::vector<T> vector) { /*…*/ };

One TS sent for its ISO ballot, three TSes completed to be published

We also spent quite a bit of the week working on three TSes that completed their review ballots, and sending out one more: The Modules TS is sent out for its comment and approval (PDTS) ballot. And the Coroutines TS, Networking TS, and Ranges TS are all done, as the groups worked hard to process and address all the comments from their ballots and we are sending them out for final publication. – It’s not every meeting that we publish three specifications! Some of them would have been handled at our last meeting, but we were busy finishing C++17 so they stacked up for this meeting.

Thank you very much again to all the volunteers who helped progress our proposals, send out our PDTSes, address our ballot comments and publish three (3) TSes, and get the C++20 cycle off to a roaring start.

Other progress

We considered merging one other published TS, the Concurrency TS. The feeling was that its three major features were in different stages of readiness, and some are advancing toward bring merged into C++20, possibly at our next meeting:

• atomic_shared_ptr<T> is on track to be merged into C++20 with changes, in detailed standardese wording review and expected to be put up for approval at our next meeting. Interestingly, some of the changes are to make it more like the original design I proposed, including to name it atomic<shared_ptr<T>>.
• Latches are also approved, essentially as-is, and the feature is in wording review for the next meeting.
• Barriers are also potentially on track for C++20 but SG1 is still discussing open design problems. Its design can be expected to change substantially from the TS version.
• Some minor pieces of the future extensions are moving ahead, but the extension has several unresolved design issues including to coordinate with the (we hope soon-coming) executors design.

Other items making progress for possible consideration to be adopted in the fall meeting:

• The first part of compile-time reflection is in wording review.
• The library groups are starting to remove deprecated features.

The Library Evolution group has started discussing at how to integrate modules and contracts into the standard library. They expect to start integrating concepts next meeting, which is a big benefit of getting a major feature merged early in the C++20 cycle. They are also actively working on Unicode support, several new containers, and a date library, among other things.

We also continued incubating other work. In particular, the Reflection study group had presentations, and gave direction and feedback, on a few additions to the static reflection proposal that is already progressing in the main subgroups, the compile-time programming proposal, and my new metaclasses paper. (I’ll post a separate report on the metaclasses part soon, probably in the next week or so, with a link to the ACCU video.)

What’s next

In my trip report last fall, two meetings ago, I wrote: “Then, once C++17 ships next year and possibly as soon as our July meeting, I expect we’ll start looking at merging more of the TS ‘beta branches’ into the C++ ‘trunk.’”

Well, that’s exactly what happened: We did finish C++17 at the next meeting, and now at the meeting after that we did merge our first major TS into the C++ trunk.

Here’s an updated snapshot of our status (the latest is always on the isocpp.org/std/status page):

Thank you again to the 120 experts in Toronto this week, and the many more who participate in standardization through their national bodies! Have a good summer – and see you at CppCon!