John Sonmez wrote a nice article on the weekend – both the article and the comments are worth reading.

“Why C++ Is Not ‘Back’”

by John Sonmez

I love C++. […] There are plenty of excellent developers I know today that still use C++ and teach others how to use it and there is nothing at all wrong with that.

So what is the problem then?

[…] Everyone keeps asking me if they need to learn C++, but just like my answer was a few years ago, it is the same today—NO!

Ok, so “NO” in caps is a bit harsh.  A better answer is “why?”

[…]

Although I don’t agree with everything John says, he presents something quite valuable, and unfortunately rare: a thoughtful hype-free opinion. This is valuable especially when (not just “even when”) it differs from your own opinion, because combining different thoughtful views of the same thing gives something exceedingly important and precious: perspective.

By definition, depth perception is something you get from seeing and combining more than one point of view. This is why one of my favorite parts of any conference or group interview is discussions between experts on points where they disagree – because experts do regularly disagree, and when they each present their thoughtful reasons and qualifications and specific cases (not just hype), you get to see why a point is valid, when it is valid and not valid, how it applies to a specific situation or doesn’t, and so on.

I encourage you to read the article and the comments. This quote isn’t the only thing I don’t fully agree with, but it’s the one thing I’ll respond to a little from the article:

There are only about three sensible reasons to learn C++ today that I can think of.

There are other major reasons in addition to those, such as:

• Servicing, which is harder when you depend on a runtime.
• Testing, since you lose the ability to test your entire application (compare doing all-static or mostly-static linking with having your application often be compiled/jitted for the first time on an end user’s machine).

These aren’t bad things in themselves, just tradeoffs and reasons to prefer native code vs managed code depending on your application’s needs.

But even the three points John does mention are very broad reasons that apply often, especially the issue of control over memory layouts, to the point where I would say: In any language, if you are serious about performance you will be using arrays a lot (not “always,” just “a lot”). Some languages make that easier and give you much better control over layout in general and arrays in particular, while other languages/environments make it harder (possible! but harder) and you have to “opt out” or “work against” the language’s/runtime’s strong preference for pointer-chasing node-based data structures.

For more, please see also my April 2012 Lang.NEXT talk “(Not Your Father’s) C++”, especially the second half:

• From 19:20, I try to contrast the value and tenets of C++ and of managed language/environments, including that each is making a legitimate and useful design choice.
• From 36:00, I try to address the question of: “can managed languages do essentially everything that’s interesting, so native C/C++ code should be really just for things like device drivers?”
• From 39:00, I talk about when each one is valuable and should be used, especially that if programmer time is your biggest cost, that’s what you should optimize for and it’s exactly what managed languages/environments are designed for.

But again, I encourage you to read John’s article – and the comments – yourself. There’s an unusually high signal-to-noise ratio here.

It’s always nice to encounter a thoughtful balanced piece of writing, whether or not we agree with every detail. Thanks, John!

A few weeks ago at the Build conference, Scott Hanselman and I sat down to talk about C++ and modern UI/UX. The podcast is now live here:

The Hanselminutes Podcast, Show #346
“Why C++” with Herb Sutter

Topics Scott raises include:

• 2:00 Scott mentions he has used C++ in the past. C++ has changed. We still call it C++, but it’s a very different language now.
• 5:30 (Why) do we care about performance any more?
• 10:00 What’s this GPGPU thing? Think of your GPU as your modern 80387.
• 13:45 C++ is having a resurgence. Where is C++ big?
• 18:00 Why not just use one language? or, What is C++ good at? Efficient abstraction and portability.
• 21:45 Programmers have a responsibility to support the business. Avoid the pitfall of speeds & feeds.
• 24:00 My experience with my iPad, my iPhone, and my Slate 7 with Win8.
• 28:45 We’re in two election seasons – (a) political and (b) technology (Nexus, iPad Mini, Surface, …). Everyone is wallpapering the media with ads (some of them attack ads), and vying for customer votes/$$, and seeing who’s going to be the winner.
• 35:00 Natural user interfaces – we get so easily used to touch that we paw all screen, and Scott’s son gets so used to saying “Xbox pause” that anything that doesn’t respond is “broken.”

Last night a reader asked one of the questions that helped motivate the creation of isocpp.org:

I am trying to learn the new C++. I am wondering if you are aware of resources or courses that can help me learn a little. I was not able to find any books for C++11. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

By the way, the isocpp website is great :)

Thanks! And you beat me to the punchline. :)

A good place to start is isocpp.org/get-started. It recommends four books, three of which have been updated for C++11 (and two of those three are available now). C++ Primer 5e is a good choice.

We also maintain a list of new articles and books under isocpp.org/blog/category/articles-books.

As for courses, there’s also a growing list of good courses there under isocpp.org/blog/category/training, including two C++11 overview courses by Scott Meyers and Dave Abrahams respectively.

As with all blog categories, you have three ways to find the most recent items under Articles & Books, Training, and other categories:

• Home page: The most recent items in each category are always listed right on the site’s newspaper-inspired home page.
• RSS: You can subscribe to RSS feeds for all posts, or for specific categories to get notifications of new articles, books, training, events, and more as they become available.
• Twitter: Follow @isocpp for notifications of new stuff.

The site and blog are curated, aiming for higher quality and lower volume. Even so, we know you won’t be able to read, watch, or listen to all of the content. So we’re doing our best to make sure that when you do pick something recommended by the site, it’s likely to be of high quality and address what you’re looking to find.

Enjoy! This is version 1 of the site… I hope that it’s already useful, and you’ll see quite a bit more over the coming year.

My live Q&A after Friday’s The Future of C++ talk is now online on Channel 9. The topics revolved around…

… recent progress and near-future directions for C++, both at Microsoft and across the industry, and talks about some announcements related to C++11 support in VC++ 2012 and the formation of the Standard C++ Foundation.

Herb takes questions from a live virtual audience and demos the new http://isocpp.org site on an 82 inch Perceptive Pixel display attached to a Windows 8 machine.

Thanks to everyone who tuned in.

Jeff Atwood’s post two days ago inspired me to write this down. Thanks, Jeff.

“I can’t even remember the last time I was this excited about a computer.”

– Jeff Atwood, November 1, 2012

---

Our industry is young again, full of the bliss and sense of wonder and promise of adventure that comes with youth.

Computing feels young and fresh in a way that it hasn’t felt for years, and that has only happened to this degree at two other times in its history. Many old-timers, including myself, have said “this feels like 1980 again.”

It does indeed. And the reason why is all about user interfaces (UI).

Wave 1: Late 1950s through 60s

First, computing felt young in the late 1950s through the 60s because it was young, and made computers personally available to a select few people. Having computers at all was new, and the ability to make a machine do things opened up a whole new world for a band of pioneers like Dijkstra and Hoare, and Russell (Spacewar!) and Engelbart (Mother of All Demos) who made these computers personal for at least a few people.

The machines were useful. But the excitement came from personally interacting with the machine.

Wave 2: Late 1970s through 80s

Second, computing felt young again in the late 1970s and 80s. Then, truly personal single-user computers were new. They opened up to a far wider audience the sense of wonder that came with having a computer of our very own, and often even with a colorful graphical interface to draw us into its new worlds. I’ll include Woods and Crowther (ADVENT) as an example, because they used a PDP as a personal computer (smile) and their game and many more like it took off on the earliest true PCs – Exidy Sorcerers and TRS-80s, Ataris and Apples. This was the second and much bigger wave of delivering computers we could personally interact with.

The machines were somewhat useful; people kept trying to justify paying $1,000 for one “to organize recipes.” (Really.) But the real reason people wanted them was that they were more intimate – the excitement once again came from personally interacting with the machine.

Non-wave: 1990s through mid-2000s

Although WIMP interfaces proliferated in the 1990s and did deliver benefits and usability, they were never as exciting to the degree computers were in the 80s. Why not? Because they weren’t nearly as transformative in making computers more personal, more fun. And then, to add insult to injury, once we shipped WIMPiness throughout the industry, we called it good for a decade and innovation in user interfaces stagnated.

I heard many people wonder whether computing was done, whether this was all there would be. Thanks, Apple, for once again taking the lead in proving them wrong.

Wave 3: Late 2000s through the 10s

Now, starting in the late 2000s and through the 10s, modern mobile computers are new and more personal than ever, and they’re just getting started. But what makes them so much more personal? There are three components of the new age of computing, and they’re all about UI (user interfaces)… count ’em:

1. Touch.
2. Speech.
3. Gestures.

Now don’t get me wrong, these are in addition to keyboards and accurate pointing (mice, trackpads) and writing (pens), not instead of them. I don’t believe for a minute that keyboards and mice and pens are going away, because they’re incredibly useful – I agree with Joey Hess (HT to @codinghorror):

“If it doesn’t have a keyboard, I feel that my thoughts are being forced out through a straw.”

Nevertheless, touch, speech, and gestures are clearly important. Why? Because interacting with touch and speech and gestures is how we’re made, and that’s what lets these interactions power a new wave of making computers more personal. All three are coming to the mainstream in about that order…

Four predictions

… and all three aren’t done, they’re just getting started, and we can now see that at least the first two are inevitable. Consider:

Touchable screens on smartphones and tablets is just the beginning. Once we taste the ability to touch any screen, we immediately want and expect all screens to respond to touch. One year from now, when more people have had a taste of it, no one will question whether notebooks and monitors should respond to touch – though maybe a few will still question touch televisions. Two years from now, we’ll just assume that every screen should be touchable, and soon we’ll forget it was ever any other way. Anyone set on building non-touch mainstream screens of any size is on the wrong side of history.

Speech recognition on phones and in the living room is just the beginning. This week I recorded a podcast with Scott Hanselman which will air in another week or two, when Scott shared something he observed firsthand in his son: Once a child experiences saying “Xbox Pause,” he will expect all entertainment devices to respond to speech commands, and if they don’t they’re “broken.” Two years from now, speech will probably be the norm as one way to deliver primary commands. (Insert Scotty joke here.)

Likewise, gestures to control entertainment and games in the living room is just the beginning. Over the past year or two, when giving talks I’ve sometimes enjoyed messing with audiences by “changing” a PowerPoint slide by gesturing in the air in front of the screen while really changing the slide with the remote in my pocket. I immediately share the joke, of course, and we all have a laugh together, but the audience members more and more often just think it’s a new product and expect it to work. Gestures aren’t just for John Anderton any more.

Bringing touch and speech and gestures to all devices is a thrilling experience. They are just the beginning of the new wave that’s still growing. And this is the most personal wave so far.

This is an exciting and wonderful time to be part of our industry.

Computing is being reborn, again; we are young again.

Yesterday, many thousands of you were in the room or live online for my talk on The Future of C++. The talk is now available online.

This has been a phenomenal year for C++, since C++11’s publication just 12 months ago. And yesterday was a great day for C++.

Yesterday I had the privilege of announcing much of what Microsoft and the industry have been working on over the past year.

(minor) C++ at Microsoft

On September 12, we shipped VC++ 2012 with the complete C++11 standard library, and adding support for C++11 range-for, enum class, override and final. Less than two months later, yesterday we announced and shipped the November 2012 CTP, a compiler add-in to VC++ 2012 adding C++11 variadic templates, uniform initialization and initializer_lists, delegating constructors, function template default arguments, explicit conversion operators, and raw string literals. Details here, and download here.

Note that this is just the first batch of additional C++11 features. Expect further announcements and deliveries in the first half of 2013.

(major) C++ across the industry

Interest and investment in C++ continues to accelerate across the software world.

• ISO C++ standardization is accelerating. Major companies are dedicating more people and resources to C++ standardization than they have in years. Over the next 24 months, we plan to ship three Technical Specifications and a new C++ International Standard.
• C++ now has a home on the web at isocpp.org. Launched yesterday, it both aggregates the best C++ content and hosts new content itself, including Bjarne Stroustrup’s new Tour of C++ and Scott Meyers’ new Universal References article.
• We now have a Standard C++ Foundation. Announced yesterday, it is already funded by the largest companies in the industry down to startups, financial institutions to universities, book publishers to other consortia, with more members joining weekly. For the first time in C++’s history since AT&T relinquished control of the language, we have an entity – a trade organization – that exists exclusively to promote Standard C++ on all compilers and platforms, and companies are funding it because the world runs on C++, and investing in Standard C++ is good business.

This is an exciting time to be part of our industry, on any OS and using any language. It’s especially an exciting time to be involved with C++ on all compilers and platforms.

Thank you all, whatever platform and language you use, for being part of it.

Links:

• VC++ November 2012 CTP announcement
• Broad C++ news release covering the CTP, standardization, site, and Foundation
• My talk yesterday covering these announcements

A few hours ago I sat down to give a short teaser for my webcast talk this Friday.

Here it is. Feel free to forward.

(I don’t think they believed me when I said I could keep it to under two minutes.)

In my talk on Friday, there will be announcements of broad interest to C++ developers on all compilers and platforms. Please help spread the word.

The Future of C++

Friday, November 2, 2012
12:45pm (U.S. Pacific Time)

This talk will give an update on recent progress and near-future directions for C++, both at Microsoft and across the industry, with some announcements of interest in both areas. The speaker is the lead language architect of Visual C++ and chair of the ISO C++ committee.

The talk will be webcast live on Channel 9, and available soon afterwards on demand.

If you know people who are interested in C++, on any platform, you’ll want to let them know to tune in.

Sarmad Asgher asked a variant of a perennial question:

I am implementing multi producer single consumer problem. I have shared variables like m_currentRecordsetSize which tells the current size of the buffer. I am using m_currentRecordsetSize in a critical section do i need to declare it as volatile.

If you’re in C or C++, and the variable is not already being protected by a mutex or similar, then you need to declare it atomic (e.g., if it’s an int, then atomic_int in C or atomic<int> in C++. Not volatile.

Also is there any article by you on this topic. Please do reply.

There is! See my article “volatile vs. volatile” for the difference and why C/C++ volatile has nothing to do with inter-thread communication.

The three by-far-most-requested “missing features” from Visual C++ 2012 were:

1. Conformance: Keep adding more C++11 language conformance features.
2. XP Targeting: Deliver the ability to build applications that could run on Windows XP, as well as Windows Vista, 7, and 8.
3. Desktop Express: Deliver a free VC++ Express compiler that can be used to create traditional Windows desktop apps, not just Windows Store apps.

Over the spring and summer, we promised to address these “soon after VC++ 2012 ships.”

Well, VC++ 2012 shipped four weeks ago.

What’s happened since then?

 

3. On the same day VS2012 shipped, four weeks ago, we also announced and released Visual Studio 2012 Desktop Express – a free Visual Studio version for writing traditional Windows applications.

 

2. Today, we are pleased to share a “community tech preview” (CTP) of Windows XP targeting in Visual C++ 2012, being delivered as part of Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 CTP 3. You can download the preview here. See the announcement page for details, known issues, and full release information.

 

1. Stay tuned…