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by mike_hock 961 days ago
The TS approach is really dumb for C++ and completely unnecessary. Compile times are long enough as it is without another meta compiler on top.

You already have a compiler. Just make it emit binary-compatible code for the new dialect. You have modules now so you don't have the problem of supporting mixed-dialect headers.
1 comments
IAmLiterallyAB 961 days ago
The TS approach isn't about having a meta compiler. cppfront is just a temporary stepping stone, just like cfront (the original C++ compiler) was a temporary frontend for C++. Eventually the goal would be to add support for the new syntax to GCC, Clang, MSVC
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wsve 961 days ago
Not just that, but a big part of Herbs feature set are things that can work as proof of concepts and proof of usefulness that could be presented to the C++ committee as actual features that can be added to C++. Many of the features of cppfront have already been proposed to committee.
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tialaramex 961 days ago
This was dead when I saw it, which is weird because it's factually true. So I vouched for it.

Herb Sutter proposes a bunch of stuff to WG21 (the C++ committee) and most of it goes nowhere. We're not talking about two proposals here, maybe a dozen is closer. Most of that stuff from many years is in Cpp2 because it's Herb's language so they can't stop him.

The one thing Herb proposed in that time which got into C++ was the spaceship operator <=> which is basically like Rust's PartialOrd trait, you write one operator for your type, and for any pair of values (this & that) you decide whether this was Greater, Equal or Less than that -- or none of the above. As a result the compiler can implement all the obvious comparison operators like <= or == or > using that one piece of code you wrote, and it's easily able to be consistent. This is very nice, and it's in C++ today, but it's also in Cpp2 of course.

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mike_hock 961 days ago
GCC and Clang are open source, though, and Clang has a sane codebase, so why not implement it in an experimental fork of Clang?
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raydev 961 days ago
I think you're underestimating the amount of work it takes to maintain a fork vs a separate transpiler layer.

Why waste time on forking clang when you can both hash out your language design and have a highly functional prototype right away?

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