C++98 Support Costs Extra!

2011-09-20

I should note, right up front, that this post reflects my personal opinion and not that of my employer. In particular, KDAB currently does not require extra payment for C++98 support, even though, as this post will make abundantly clear, I personally wouldn’t mind if it did :).

So, the new C++ standard is finalised and voted on unanimously. Does that mean that we’ll have another decade of C++ incompatibilities ahead of us?

My answer to that is: That depends on us.

Will we adopt C++11 faster than C++98? Our compilers do. Will we make use of the new productivity gains ( auto , range-for, lambdas, …) or will we continue to castrate our code to work with 15-year-old compilers? The answers of the majority of C++ programmers will determine how the next decade goes for all of us.

In this post, I’ll argue (strongly) for dropping C++98 support asap, and using C++11 to the fullest possible extent in all our projects. This includes dropping support for compilers and platforms that don’t (yet) support C++11 to the extent required by a particular project instead of #ifdef ing our way around it, as we (as an industry) have done for the past 30 years. Will these compilers and platforms be left out in the cold? Not really: they will have older versions of libraries and programs to support them. But yes, newer versions will require an up-to-date C++ compiler.

Is this realistic? I think it is.

Essentially, we have this situation already now. Many projects require fairly recent versions of libraries, precisely because 1) there’s not much point in supporting older versions, and 2) supporting many versions of one library with the same code-base is fairly expensive. I’ve tried. Gpgme++ theoretically supports gpgme’s that can be considered stone-aged. Has anyone ever tested this? Hmmm… How many Mac applications still support OS X 10.2? 10.3? 10.4? Half of the web doesn’t work anymore on KDE 3.5’s Konqueror.

Then why should we be so conservative when it comes to C++, the very core of what we work with? It’s not even customer-visible. Why do we accept an STL shipping in 2011 that is basically unchanged from the mid-1990s? Why do we #ifdef our way around MSVC6 problems in 2011? Why do we care about the quirks of GCC 3.3, or heaven forbid, 2.95?

My new-year’s resolution (ok, it’s a bit early, but hey): stop it!

C++11 support in C++ compilers now is much stronger than C++98 support was in 1998 in the then-C++-compilers. I fully expect every C++ compiler to have caught up on final C++11 with its next major release, except for source-code invisible changes like the new memory model. I want Qt 5 to require a C++11 compiler. I want KDE 5 to require a C++11 compiler. I will lobby inside KDAB to do the same.

Why? Because I’m a programmer, and we’re lazy.

I want to use auto . If you make me type std::map<std::string,std::string>::const_iterator instead of auto , it’s more work, less fun, so you should need to pay extra.

I want to use lambdas. If you make me write

struct ByName : std::binary_function<Foo,Foo,bool> { result_type operator()( const Foo & lhs, const Foo & rhs ) const { return lhs.name() < rhs.name() ; } };

instead of [](const Foo &lhs, const Foo &rhs) { return lhs.name() < rhs.name() ; } , it’s more work, less fun, so you should need to pay extra.

C++11 is a much more productive language than C++98. We as an industry can, however, only reap that productivity gain if we stop throwing C++ productivity out of the window by the bucket-load in the hopeless pursuit of compatibility with non-standard implementations. The worst offender, Microsoft, has seen the light. Their current compilers are very standards-compliant, and actively maintained. I hope that Apple won’t be the next blocker: By choosing Clang over GCC for—apparently—political reasons (GCC 4.2 was the last GCC with GPLv2), they have lost at least one year of C++11 support that GCC and VC are ahead of Clang. Let’s hope Clang catches up soon.

[[EDIT 2011-09-21: If you think that VC isn’t implementing C++11 fast enough, you can make yourselves heard here: http://visualstudio.uservoice.com, in particular here and here.]]

[[EDIT 2012-03-30: Microsoft has announced that the VC++ compiler will have a faster release cycle than Visual Studio. That makes me hope that we’ll see a “reasonably conforming” (Sutter) VC++ a long time before 2014. Also, Clang++ 3.1 has caught up a lot with GCC (http://clang.llvm.org/cxx_status.html#cxx11, 3.1 currently shows up as “SVN”); it seems tooling will indeed not be the problem, after all.]]