C++ in 2015

published at 15.01.2015 15:05 by Jens Weller

The year is still young, so lets have an outlook about what is going to happen in C++ Land in 2015...

Like in 2013 & 2014 I'd like to ask, what to expect from C++ in 2015? The last year has brought a lot of changes, C++14 is now available not only as a standard, but also as a toolchain with GCC and Clang offering support. Also C++ Studio seems to finally bring in some C++14 and almost all C++11 features, and also Intels Compiler is now C++11 feature complete. So, the new Standards are now really available to all platforms. The modern C++ Standard is production ready in 2015!

C++ Standards

Which brings me to the field of ISO C++. Wouldn't it be cool if we get full (100%) C++11 Support on all major compilers this year? And maybe, just maybe also C++14 on most of them? Also, if you update your project to a newer standard version, in this year, choose C++14 if you can. And technically, C++14 just got released in 2015 by the ISO.

But something else is out there. Not many have yet had a good view on it, and maybe some only claim to have seen it, but I expect in 2015 to see C++17 take shape. A few facts are already known from last years committee meeting in Illinois, with Concepts and better Parallelism/Concurrency support expected, C++17 will change C++ much more then any C++ standard. Especially if its released with extensions, as Hartmut Kaiser suggested in the Meeting C++ 2014 interview, some of the Technical Specifications which did not get into the standard, could still ship as an extension in most implementations. Currently resumable functions(aka await/async) is already doing that in Visual Studio.

So it will be interesting to see, how the different features for C++17 progress in this year, with the concepts meeting in January it looks fairly good for having this in C++17, this year will show us what else can be expected in C++17...

Community & Blogs

In 2014 a lot of new C++ User Groups were founded, in Europe, the US but also as far as India. To Meeting C++ even visitors from Australia and South Korea came. I expect this to continue in 2015, there will be a lot of new C++ User Groups meeting the first time in this year. This is the known user groups in Europe overview I showed at Meeting C++:

Also, I noticed that a lot of people have started writing about C++ online, my very own RSS reader has now 93 Feeds from blogs, YouTube and libraries. Meeting C++ together with reddit, hackernews and isocpp.org can generate a lot of traffic for your new C++ blog.

There is already one new C++ Blog and a new years resoltion for a C++ User Group in Ingolstadt/Germany!

Libraries

I already said last year that more libraries will keep showing up. 2014 was a very good year, a lot of companies open sourced interesting frameworks, and github keeps on bubbling with all kinds of interesting projects.

boost

The first library has already been accepted into boost this year, boost.compute. I hope to see again two releases of boost this year, many interesting libraries are waiting for review! So if you think about getting involved with boost, joining a review is a great start, also review managers are needed. Also, as last year presented at C++Now, there is now the boost library incubator, in which already 16 libraries are listed!

Qt

I've been to the Qt DevDays last year, and I do write the backend of Meeting C++ in C++ with Qt (UI/Database part). In December Qt 5.4 got released, which improves the support for Android and embedded. QML is now usable for Apps and Desktop, and in 2015 Qt will continue to release even more features. Qt 5.5 is to be expected by end of April.

Tools

Also in 2015, the tool chains for C++ will advance. In the IDE field there is a new competitor with CLion, also Visual Studio 2015 with its support for Android and even more C++ Standards. And oh wait, there is GCC 5.0, which will bring OpenMP 4.0 and full(?) C++14 support.

Also other tools will improve, such as static code checking, and maybe biicode will go open source?

Important Dates

Lets also have a look at some important dates for C++ in 2015, first, the upcoming comittee meetings:

26-29th January: ISO C++ concepts meeting, (New Jersey, USA)

23-27th February: ISO C++ Library meeting, (Cologne, Germany)

4-9th May: ISO C++ Spring Meeting, (Lenexa, Kansas, USA)

19-24th October: ISO C++ Fall Meeting, (Kona, Hawaii, USA)

I plan to attend the library meeting in Cologne, as its directly around the corner for me. Yet, there are also a lot of C++ Conferences which will happen this year:

27/28 February: C++ Russia

5-6th May: ADC++

21-25th April: ACCU

11-16th May: C++Now

20-25th September: CppCon

4-5th December: Meeting C++

Meeting C++ 2015 is yet, like some other conferences, not announced. The announcement for Meeting C++ will be mid of February, when the Call for Papers starts and the first early bird tickets are available shortly after.

So, this year will be a good one for C++.

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