Re: [Monotone-devel] C++11

[Markus Wanner]

Jack,

On 05/14/2014 05:08 PM, Jack Lloyd wrote:
> I plan to maintain 1.10 at more or less the current level of support
> (which is essentially: fixing bugs as they are reported but with
> little to no new development work) for an extended period with 2.0
> being a parallel stable track, until at least a majority of distros
> have switched.

That's good to know. Thanks for your continued efforts in providing a
decent crypto library.

> It's worth keeping in mind it may well be another year or more before
> a new stable tree even happens, there are a lot of open projects I'd
> like to work on before committing to supporting things for the long
> haul.

Understood, makes sense to me, yes.

> I think C++11 is somewhat deceptive in that many of the changes seem
> trivial and 'just' save you some extra typing (auto, range-for,
> lambdas, and non-static member initializers in particular come to mind
> in this class) but I've found they can offer a huge advantage in
> productivity vs C++98. Writing C++11 can often feel more like writing
> Python or ML than C++98. As a basically solo developer with only
> intermittent time for side projects anything that enhances my ability
> to get something done is welcome - I expect monotone is in a somewhat
> similar situation in that sense.
> 
> IMO the most generally useful addition to the language is rvalue
> references; even applications which don't use them directly benefit
> from its use in the standard library, and where applicable they can
> definitely help performance. As Monotone spends a good bit of time
> moving around memory blos I expect you could see some great wins
> here.
> 
> The reduced set of compilers that support C++11 is a mixed bag. It is
> unfortunate, in terms of reducing portability, but wonderful for
> setting a much higher bar for compiler quality. Not having to worry
> about weird bugs in GCC 3.4 or Visual C++ 2008 anymore is nice. One
> other problem is the tool ecosystem (ffi generators, static analyzers,
> and so on) has not yet caught up to support C++11, though that's
> started to get better in the last year or so.

Thanks for that first-hand experience. Very much appreciated.

I absolutely agree that rvalues and the entire concept of moving (rather
than copying) is the most useful new feature. But there's a bit of a
learning curve. Once you get the hang of it (and I'm not claiming I'm
completely there, yet), you're starting to question how you've ever been
able to write C++ without it (I certainly had that feeling, already).

> The library additions are nice but are probably less essential if you
> already are relying on boost. As previously botan did not use boost,
> getting the sudden addition of std::function, a portable threading
> library, regexes, shared_ptr, and so on was a huge help.

Yeah, it's quite an improvement.

In the past, there certainly were efforts to get rid of boost. I'm not
sure about the exact benefits, as of now, but C++11 would certainly get
us a huge step towards that goal.

Regards

Markus Wanner

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