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C++ Revision Gathers Steam for ’09


By P J Connolly
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July 15, 2007 —  (Page 1 of 3)
The C++ programming language has a rich history, but it’s been almost a decade since the last significant changes were made to it. At the risk of stating the obvious, a few things have happened in computing since November 1997, when the C++98 standard—ISO/IEC 14882 to be precise—was frozen.

But Working Group 21—the ISO/IEC C++ standards committee—hasn’t been idle, even though the only tweaks to C++ in the intervening years have come in the form of a 2003 technical corrigendum, a sort of patch release. In 2005, the workgroup published a draft of a report on desired extensions to the C++ standard library, Technical Report 1. TR1, as it’s known, is the first of at least two reports on the subject; much of the material in this first report will be incorporated into the next version of the C++ standard, referred to for now as C++0x.

The document updating C++ is due for ratification by the ISO member states in 2008, and upon introduction the next year, the new version will likely be referred to as C++09.

An overriding concern is to maintain compatibility with C++98, and wherever possible with C, making sure that “we don’t actually go and break code in large amounts,” noted C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup. “We can’t just do the best in the abstract; it has to be the best for the community, both the implementers and the users.”

Another architecturally conservative decision is seen in the preference of using the standard library to add features, instead of bolting functionality onto the core language. At the same time, the C++ core isn’t carved in stone. According to Stroustrup, one of the purposes of this review is to remove errors and inconsistencies from the core.

Herb Sutter, convener of the C++0x working group, explained that among the main enhancements are support for concurrency and multithreading, and the addition of garbage collection. Also making his hot list are extensions to the standard library, including support for hash containers, regular expressions and smart pointers. Although many vendors ship support for these and other prestandard functions in their STL (Standard Template Library) packages, this upcoming release will mark their official move from the TR1 library to the official C++ standard library.




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