Sutter’s Mill Herb Sutter on software development

Time 2020-12-16 07:03:02

Web Name: Sutter’s Mill Herb Sutter on software development

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Back in early July, I did a wide-ranging ask me anything Q A session at C++ Russia. The video is now available I hope you enjoy it. Thanks again to C++ Russia for inviting me to their great online event!On Monday, the ISO C++ committee completed its final full-committee (plenary) meeting of 2020 and adopted the first changes to the C++23 working draft, including a few new features.This was a first in several ways: It was our first-ever virtual plenary, held online via Zoom. It was also our first-ever plenary meeting that wasn’t held at the end of a long around-the-clock week of intensive subgroup meetings; instead, it was held at the end of nearly nine months of virtual subgroup meetings.The pandemic was just getting started when we held our February meeting in Prague, Czech Republic. Since then it has of course been impossible to meet in person; as I mentioned before, our ISO C++ meetings are virtual until further notice, but we continue to have the same priorities and the same schedule for C++23.So since the pandemic began, WG21 subgroups have been meeting virtually via Zoom. Some subgroups had already been having virtual meetings for years, but this was a major change for other groups including our two main design groups – the language and library evolution working groups (EWG and LEWG).In all, since Prague we have held about 150 virtual meetings. When lots of subgroups are meeting, some of them weekly, those meetings add up!On Monday we formally adopted the first features of C++23, including the first C++23 language feature, as well as a number of bug fixes.First up was P0330 by JeanHeyd Meneide, which adds a literal suffix for (signed) size_t, so in C++23 we will be able to write literals like 100uz. (I wonder whether uz will be pronounced Uzi.) See the many excellent side-by-side examples in JeanHeyd’s paper for how this helps make uses of size_t safer and more convenient especially in naked for loops iterating over containers. Congratulations to JeanHeyd for C++23’s first language extension, and also for his persistence with this paper – the adopted version is revision 8, and that number and the paper’s change history indicates the level of rigor that can be required to get a feature into C++. Many thanks!P1679 by Wim Leflere and Paul Fee add a basic_string::contains function so we can write code like if (str.contains(substr)) std::cout found!\n I can already hear the chorus of “finally!”P0881 by Alexey Gorgurov and Antony Polukhin add a stacktrace library to C++23. This is a much-anticipated extension based on Boost.Stacktrace that will enable much easier-to-debug portable diagnostic messages.The charmingly numbered P1048 by Juan Alday gives us an is_scoped_enum type trait to detect when an enumeration is defined using the new-style (C++11, but well it’s still “new”!) enum class. As the paper points out, this is particularly useful as a migration aid, including to write code that detects and measures the adoption of “enum class” over plain old “enum.”Finally, P0943 by Hans Boehm supports C atomics (spelled _Atomic) in C++ where the two did not already overlap, which helps write headers that work in both C and C++. (The adopted version is R6 which should be published in the next few weeks.) This is one example of the ongoing extra coordination we’ve had lately between the C and C++ committees, which leads to the next thing we did…We appointed a new study group, SG22, for C/C++ liaison. This is a unique study group, because it is shared jointly by both the C and C++ committees, and it continues the tradition of closer coordination between the two committees. Thank you to WG14 (C) and its chair David Keaton for their continued interest in coordinating the two languages, to Aaron Ballman for agreeing to chair this new group, and for our WG14 and WG21 project editors Thomas Köppe, JeanHeyd Meneide, and Richard Smith to serve as assistant chairs. Thank you all for being willing to step up!Thank you to Richard Smith for his work for many years as project editor for the C++ standard, and completing C++20 this month! Thank you also to the many of you who have helped Richard and shared the editing workload by providing PRs and proofreading to apply plenary resolutions; that has been very much appreciated by Richard and by all of us especially given that C++20 is a “big” release with many new features, all of which have created an unusually high amount of editing work for this release.Starting now, as we begin C++23, Thomas Köppe has graciously agreed to step up to be our primary project editor for the standard, with Richard as backup project editor. Thank you Thomas, and thank you again Richard and to all who have helped with the editing for the C++ IS!While we are meeting virtually until further notice, we will continue to have virtual plenaries like the one we had this week to formally adopt new features as they progress through subgroups. Our next virtual plenary will be in February, on the Monday of what would have been the Kona meeting.Progress during this time will be slower than when we can meet face-to-face, and we’ll doubtless defer some topics that really need in-person discussion until we can meet again safely, but in the meantime we’ll make what progress we can and we’ll ship C++23 on time.Thank you again to the hundreds of people who are working tirelessly on C++, even in our current altered world. Your flexibility and willingness to adjust are much appreciated by all of us in the committee and by all the C++ communities! Thank you, and see you on Zoom.Here it is, I hope you enjoy it. Note that as of this writing the Clang-based prototype implementation on Godbolt is not yet complete, in particular it still needs to implement out and forward parameters.It s hard to believe CppCon 2020 is nearly here in fact, pre-conference tutorials are already in progress.I ll be at the conference throughout the week in the hallways and session rooms. Here are some of the times I ll be participating on the actual program:Sunday 1300 MDT: Organizer s Panel. In the middle of the Welcome Reception, we re holding an Organizer s Panel where several of us organizers will be talking about what to expect in the week ahead and available for extensive Q A to answer any questions you may have. (We will have live music during the whole Welcome Reception, so be sure to watch the chat window for how to join that stream if you want to listen to our CppCon house band leader, Jim Basnight, perform for us.)Monday 1500 MDT: My AMA. I ll be available for an ask me anything session. Attendees can ask questions across the board from C++20 features, to how the committee is working during the pandemic on C++23, to specific C++ features I ve designed or contributed to like concurrency or structured bindings or the spaceship operator, or other things you may think of.Tuesday 0730 MDT: Committee Fireside Chat Panel (moderator). This year, I won t be a panelist myself, so I don t plan to answer any questions. Instead, I ll be the panel moderator, and we have a great slate of panelists again this year: Bjarne Stroustrup (of course), Bryce Adelstein Lelbach (library evolution subgroup chair), Hana Dusíková (compile-time programming subgroup chair), Inbal Levi (Israel national chair), JC Van Winkel (Netherlands national chair and teaching subgroup chair), JF Bastien (language evolution subgroup chair), Michael Wong (low-latency/gaming/embedded subgroup chair and AI subgroup chair), and Tony Van Eerd (expert in many subgroups and popular speaker). I can t wait!Wednesday 0730 MDT: Bjarne Stroustrup AMA (moderator). This is Bjarne s AMA, I m just the moderator.(will be recorded) Friday 1330 MDT: Empirically Measuring, and Reducing, C++ s Accidental Complexity. This is my one actual talk, and it s the last talk of the conference. It will be a major update of the talk I ve given publicly one time before in Prague earlier this year, which after a broader intro focused specifically on parameter passing as an example of where we could dramatically simplify C++. This time I ll include lots of updates, including that I hope to demo a working compiler implementation of the proposal.Denver time zone (MDT) is the default, which is where the physical CppCon usually happens. The Sched.org view lets you show the schedule in your own time zone.The conference starts Sunday. You don t have to wait for Bjarne s opening keynote on Monday if you re attending, be sure to make use of the Open House from 0900-1200 MDT where you can wander around, and especially the Welcome Reception from 1200-1430 MDT which includes the first panel (see above).On Friday September 4, C++20 s DIS (Draft International Standard) ballot ended, and it passed unanimously. This means that C++20 has now received final technical approval and is done with ISO balloting, and we expect it to be formally published toward the end of 2020 after we finish a final round of ISO editorial work.As always, we are not counting on ISO s publication speed to call it C++20, it s C++20 because WG21 completed technical work in February. If for some reason ISO needs until January to get it out the door and assigns it a 2021 publication date, the standard will still be referred to as C++20. That is already its industry name, and 300,000+ search hits can t be (retroactively made) wrong!A month ago, I notified the committee that our face-to-face meetings will be postponed until further notice. We still need to plan for face-to-face meetings so that we re ready to resume when that s possible and safe, but for now all currently planned meetings should be viewed as tentative. Among other constraints such as national and corporate travel restrictions, we are subject to face-to-face meeting bans from several parent organizations. Two of those extended or enacted face-to-face meeting bans this week, on Tuesday September 1:INCITS, the U.S. standards body, extended its face-to-face meeting ban through March 31, 2021. This means that our Kona meeting planned for February is now formally postponed to an unspecified future date.ISO SC22, our corner of the international organization for standardization that handles programming languages, resolved to ban face-to-face meetings of more than 100 people until further notice. Since our meetings lately have regularly seen over 200 attendees, we re currently evaluating how this affects future post-Kona tentative meeting plans.All of these bans are subject to further extension, and we won t meet in person again until it s safe to do so. As of this writing, our next tentative face-to-face meeting would be the rescheduled Varna meeting, in the first week of June 2021, but that should be viewed as the earliest possible resumption of meetings. As the pandemic develops and INCITS and ISO meeting bans and other restrictions are extended, it s certainly possible that we may not be able to meet again in 2021 at all. We ll see.In the meantime, though, we re still making progress on our work: For several years, we have already been holding regular virtual meetings for some of our subgroups, including study groups (SGs) and CWG and LWG (language and library specification wording). Since the pandemic started, EWG and LEWG (language and library evolution, our primary design subgroups) have also begun meeting virtually, and we are continuing to adjust our process for how to approve design changes to progress proposals while not meeting in person. And starting in November, we will begin having virtual plenary (whole-group) meetings to formally approve changes, including potentially new features, to the C++23 working paper The C++23 schedule (P1000R4) and C++23 priorities (P0592R4) are unaffected by the pandemic. You may find this surprising, but that s because the committee is on a train model that focuses on schedule and priorities for each release, instead of a specific feature set. One of the benefits of the train model is that it is very resilient, and can handle even major disruptions without change. We have already been in the mode of working on features all the time, including long-pole features that take many years, and each regular release train includes “whatever’s ready” with the next train opening up as soon as the previous one ships. So, that is unchanged.What has changed, of course, is the speed at which we can work on features during the coming period. The pandemic disruptions have impacted all our lives, and reduced the time and energy WG21 participants have for standards work as well as our capacity to make progress face to face three times a year, and this has slowed down development of features we’re working on now that will land in { C++23, C++26, C++29 } . No virtual process will fully compensate for the lack of intense week-long face-to-face meetings, but as usual we’ll continue to make progress on baking features according to the P0592R4 priorities, including issue resolutions and an emphasis on completing C++20, and as usual we’ll load each feature into the currently loading train as the feature becomes ready. So progress continues, and the trains will continue to run on time to ship everything that s ready.Of course, the ISO C++ committee isn t the only part of the C++ world that has gone virtual this year. We ve been enjoying many virtual conferences, and just a week from now we ll start the biggest C++ conference of the year: CppCon 2020, all online. I look forward to seeing many of you there, including literally seeing you at the video chat tables and in my AMA Q A session early in the week, and the Committee Fireside Chat panel on Tuesday.Two weeks ago, I had the privilege of speaking at the C++ on Sea 2020 virtual conference. The video of my talk has now been posted it s an extended version of the talk I gave at DevAroundTheSun in April. You can find it here:Thanks very much to Phil Nash and all the other organizers and volunteers who made the virtual event run so smoothly! And thanks also to the post-processing team who did all the videos, including that they did a smooth job of fixing my video hiccup in the middle when I lost my link and had to reconnect to resume (entirely my pilot error).A software note: I really enjoyed the Remo platform that C++ on Sea used this year. It allowed for lots of attendee interaction that s surprisingly like mingling at a physical conference you are in what looks and feels like a room with lots of tables, just like at a conference, and can easily talk face to face (video and audio) with all the folks who are at your table, and move from table to table to mix and mingle. It really felt seamless. I enjoyed spending time talking with some of you there that way it was great to meet new people as well as see some familiar faces, and I look forward to doing it again soon this September because the current plan is for the also-all-virtual CppCon 2020 to use the same software. So, I hope to literally see many of you then! In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this talk.Last month, I gave a new talk Bridge to NewThingia at DevAroundTheSun. Using examples from the evolution of programming languages and a few other tech products, it analyzes some key design factors that let you confidently answer the question, why will your NewThing succeed, when a lot of things that look like it have failed in the past? The talk video is now available on YouTube, linked below. I hope you enjoy it, and thanks again to the organizers of DevAroundTheSun for putting together this global online event.A few minutes ago, I announced to the ISO C++ committee that all our meetings originally planned for 2020 have been postponed. We had already postponed the Varna meeting originally planned for June 1-6, and earlier today INCITS (the U.S. national body) announced that it was banning all face-to-face standards meetings for the rest of the year, so we are also postponing the New York meeting previously planned for November 9-14. We deeply appreciate all the work the Varna and New York hosts have put into planning to have us in town, and we still look forward to meeting there as soon as it is safe to do so.The meeting after that is currently still planned in Kona for February 22-27, but that too is now under review as we monitor developments including any possible further ISO or INCITS meeting ban extensions. We will not meet unless we are permitted to do so and can be confident we can meet safely.It still feels surreal that in just one week from now we would all have been traveling to Bulgaria for the first meeting of C++23. But that was in a different world, and reality and facts matter. In the meantime, the ISO C++ committee and the C++ community have been moving online, with more ISO subgroup meetings already working on C++23 features and more C++ community events taking place in wonderful locations called Zoom and YouTube Live, instead of in Varna and New York, at least for now. Thank you again to everyone who is organizing those meetings and events for us, including the recent Pure Virtual C++ online event and the upcoming C++ Europe and C++ Russia and C++ on Sea online conferences, and still more to come!Stay safe, everyone. We hope that you and your loved ones are holding up well and that we ll be able to see each other again soon.I try hard to always ask for feedback on drafts of my talks and articles, and I always learn important things from the responses, including especially things I omitted but should include so as to pre-answer audience questions. Just like the best support call is the one the customer doesn t have to make because they didn t have a problem, the best post-talk question is the one the audience doesn t have to ask because the answer was clear in the talk.Here s a very small example from the talk I gave last week just a little thing, but like many little things one that could derail people s minds and be a distraction from the talk s intended message.When we did the tech check a few days before the talk, I displayed my opening slide, which was When it came up on the stream, I heard the techs say great, we can see it fine, Bridge to Newt Hinge Ya and they stumbled over the last word. Only then did I realize that the cute name I was using that was so clear to me (and kind of central to the talk s message) was not clear at all in fact, instead of setting the stage for the message, it created a what does that mean? question that distracted from the message.(Aside: I think it s pretty funny that the bug appeared to be a version of the max munch rule, but with the English language it seems that their eyes scanned the word and found that the first four letters matched an English word, newt, and then they took that and scanned onward for the next part but their mental tokenizer was already derailed.)So I updated the slide to try to preempt the problem, by capitalizing one letter to provide a visual cue about the intended word end (and doing some minor visual rebalancing so it fit):I also tried variations like NewThing-ia but the extra punctuation seemed unnecessary and felt a bit stilted. It felt like just capitalizing the T was enough and as far as I know this eliminated the problem, though admittedly I didn t re-test the update on a new person before the talk. :)It was just a little thing, but it s an example of how little things can be important. I suppose it s also an example of naming is hard and of names matter. I appreciated the techs implicit feedback that helped me debug my title and pre-eliminate a what does this mean question.

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