Ovidiu Predescu's Weblog

Daveed Vandevoorde on C++ templates

Daveed Vandevoorde of Edison Design Group, the only company with a fully compliant C++ parser, gave a talk today to a small audience at HP on C++ templates. I never programmed professionally on C++, and boy, how glad I am I didn't ;)

The language is very complex and focuses on syntax and the semantics behind it a lot. It's completely different from simpler languages like Lisp, Smalltalk, Objective-C, Python and to a lesser extend Java, which prefer to put the power in a powerful runtime system. These languages implement a lot of the language semantics in the runtime system, rather than in the compiler. The less type-constraining a language is, the simpler the compiler, and more powerful the language at runtime. Personally I prefer dynamically typed languages since they allow you to implement very powerful patterns. Lisp, Objective-C, Python and many others: I love them all!

Daveed's book C++ templates is due to appear November 8 on the shelves. Another friend of mine, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote Modern C++ Design, another book which describes patterns in C++. The only thing I wonder though is how many people are still using C++ in new commercial developments.