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Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

Had nobody ever attempted to fix these problems in a non-backwards-compatible way? I'm imagining a new "almost-c++" that ditches the preprocessor for something better and makes a few other changes with the goal of vastly improved compile times. Then it should be possible to produce a GCC or Clang++ plugin that translates from C++ to "almost-C++" automatically, making it trivial to switch.

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Yes, they have. It's called D: http://www.digitalmars.com/d

It doesn't have an automatic translator, but it's design does follow a rule of "If a piece of C code is dropped into a D compiler, either it compiles with the same semantics, or it doesn't compile."

BTW, Someone needs to fix the CSS for this text-entry box. Someone set the text color to black, but forgot to set the background color too. So on my light-on-dark system, I get Invisible-text-syndrome and have to edit in notepad and copy-paste into the text-box. Wheee!

Also note that the author of the article is also the author of D.

I think the automatic translator is the most important part.

C++ isn't without it's age spots, but articles like this do nothing to give a balanced view of its usefulness vs. issues. Many languages have boasted to topple C++ and it hasn't happened it, mostly because C++ does its job well enough and other languages aren't better enough so that migrating large code bases is cost effective.

As far as this specific complaint goes, I've worked on large-scale C++ programs and I've rarely come across anything prohibitive as far as compile times are concerned. Granted, C is faster, as are some other languages, but in terms of overall project development time, compiling is dwarfed under requirements, design, coding, testing, collaboration, etc. It's a non-sequitur that improving compile time would have any overall impact on development.

The article was not intended to give a balanced view of issues vs usefulness. It was attempting to explain why C++ compiles relatively slowly, which is a common question people ask me. Whether or not the speed issues are balanced by other considerations is up to the C++ user.

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