This proposal, for the next standard of C++, which is a general-purpose programming language, lists hardware architectures, OS platforms, and environments that should be prioritized. From a technical point of view, this is absolute nonsense. It is not the place of a programming language to prioritize hardware architectures or OS platforms. It is the job of a compiler for this language to implement the specification for various platforms and the implementation may be more or less optimized depending on the backend, but the language itself should be entirely agnostic. And even if you accept the premise that it makes sense to define a list of priorities, let’s take a look: none of the various BSD operating systems have made the list, despite having significant, vibrant communities and a long history of working, but Fuchsia, Google’s own, not-ready-yet operating system, has. Hmmm. Also, there is a curious insistence on prioritizing little-endian hardware, which would be detrimental to a certain number of embedded systems and other platforms, but it so happens that Google uses none of them.
And it just so happens that out of the 17 authors of that document, 8 of them are working at Google.
Seems like Google is trying to recuperate the ISO to convert C++ into corporate bloatware. I would be cautious when using C++ in the future.
I can think of many reasons not to use C++, but I’m not too worried about this. No matter what the standard says, I’m quite confident that at least
g++will continue to support platforms with “lower priority”, and they can still follow the standard even if the compiler doesn’t target Google’s new (presumably proprietary) OS.deleted by creator
A list of my reasons? My main problems are syntax-related + the lack of powerful macros (although very few non-Lisp languages have this). In terms of performance, hardware support, libraries, etc., I have no complaints.
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