[htobc]

Rather than engage in an unrelated language-war flame bait, why not actually discuss this particular issue with C++? Yes having a language built around zero cost abstractions for low level programming is a must, but how does that end up justifying this wild complexity around making constexpr more powerful?

In the real world I would think trying to do any of the things discussed in this article should be an automatic commit rejection on any project.

[SuperV1234]

This particular issue is a niche corner case of C++26 reflection, which -- like reflection in other languages -- is a massively useful feature.

In the real world, failing to understand what you're reading and eagerly generalising to the entire language should be an automatic hiring rejection in any team.

[ux266478]

i'd like to point out that C++26's reflection is the third reflection standard defined by the language to cover the "niche corner cases" that have hereto been lacking from the other two (RTTI and type traits). this specific "niche corner case" also would not exist if C++ did not commit to a poorly-bolted on feature that turned out to be accidentally powerful, and instead intentionally designed powerful metaprogramming facilities from day 1.

there's a point at which "pragmatism" starts being anything but, and it was around C++11 give or take a standard. how on earth do you use it day to day and not feel the schizophrenic non-design being a generalized property across the whole language?

[htobc]

Hey buddy, maybe not liking something is not the same thing as not understanding it? Maybe saying, "this specific feature is bad" is not a generalization to the entire language? Maybe niche corner cases are evidence of poorly chosen primitives and bad design? Maybe jumping straight to smarm and skipping past actually defending the feature means you probably create a work environment no one wants to be in? And an esoteric paradigm like "constexpr two-stepping" that is explained in the article by linking a video that is _over an hour long_ is a perfect example of something that, while perhaps the author and demonstrator explored more for fun instead of as a serious thing to do, would only ever be put into a production code base by the most amateur of architecture astronauts, shortly before their startup fails?

For real though, defend constexpr two-stepping as a real use case for serious people.

Or did you just get a little bit confused and think the criticism here is actually coming from people who are out of their depth from hearing "compile time optimization" or don't know what reflection is?

[SuperV1234]

> would only ever be put into a production code base by the most amateur of architecture astronauts, shortly before their startup fails?

Yep, definitely failure of understanding. :)

> For real though, defend constexpr two-stepping as a real use case for serious people.

Of course, here's a use case: I am a serious person developing a library that provides a nice API to solve a real-world problem using C++26 reflection. As part of the internal library machinery, I need some temporary storage for some compile-time algorithm (e.g. building a graph for automatic parallelization, or some other thing like that). In an internal helper function of my library, I use constexpr two-stepping to solve the problem without imposing hard limits on my algorithms and keeping the final API as simple as possible for the end user.

Then I submit my PR, but htobc reviews it and immediately rejects it, ignoring the real business value of the library because I made a conscious engineering decision to use a niche technique to solve a language limitation as part of my library implementation.

Then my startup fails.

[htobc]

And then it turns out after ignoring any attempts to actually engage in the technical merits of how constexpr is done in C++, you made it 25 minutes into the 1 hour video, past all the obvious jokes from the presenter about how absurd it is to try and use the feature, where it turned out that it wasn't supported in your tool chain. Then you realized you were weirdly obsessed with making sure no one ever criticises anything about C++ and it turned out your real special interest was not having friends.

(There are far simpler ways to do that.)

[SuperV1234]

Many, if not most, useful libraries, languages, and tools have weird hacks and corner cases in them that look esoteric and insane from the outside.

The reasonable engineer understands why they exist. The engineer with a hate boner or negative bias for a particular technology jumps on the opportunity to make a generalized statement.

I'd rather not be friends with the second kind of engineer. :)

[htobc]

Okay so why not _discuss that_. You're N posts deep in a thread where I've been actively trying since the start to pull this away from a language flame-war, (and acknowledge your bizarrely anti social style of interaction) while again pulling the conversation back towards actually being about constexpr, and all you can say is anyone who criticises it is too stupid to understand it.

I think it's telling that you are quick to respond to my superficial meta discussion, but have left the one reply up the chain about this being the "third reflection standard from the C++ committee" conspicuously unaddressed. Gotta dodge saying anything real at all costs? Or just trying to get your rocks off with an internet fight?