MOmodernerd·Feb 5, 2025
I haven't read much from Bjarne but this is refreshingly self-aware and paints a hopeful path to standardize around "the good parts" of C++.
As a C++ newbie I just don't understand the recommended path I'm supposed to follow, though. It seems to be a mix of "a book of guidelines" and "a package that shows you how you should be using those guidelines via implementation of their principles".
After some digging it looks like the guidebook is the "C++ Core Guidelines":
https://isocpp.github.io/CppCoreGuidelines/CppCoreGuidelines
And I'm supposed to read that and then:
> use parts of the standard library and add a tiny library to make use of the guidelines convenient and efficient (the Guidelines Support Library, GSL).
Which seems to be this (at least Microsoft's implementation):
https://github.com/microsoft/GSL
And I'm left wondering, is this
Read the rest
just how C++ is? Can't the language provide tooling for me to better adhere to its guidelines, bake in "blessed" features and deprecate what Bjarne calls, "the use of low-level, inefficient, and error-prone features"? I feel like these are tooling-level issues that compilers and linters and updated language versions could do more to solve.